Scholars and Patients

The purpose of this report is to show how disparities between people's actual performances and their expectations with respect to those performances help to account for their differential use of a professional help agency. More specifically, the study relates college students' academic performances to their use of medical clinic facilities, employing their scores on the College Entrance Examination Board verbal aptitude examination as an explanatory variable. These scores are available to the students and to the college administration before the students arrive at college. Their importance here is that they provide a standardized indication of the probability that certain students will perform well, and others poorly. The study's major assumption is that the students do use these scores as a standard against which to compare their subsequent academic performances. In apparent support of this assumption, the study shows that the disparity between verbal aptitude and academic performance predicts more accurately the frequency with which students seek medical attention than either criterion utilized separately. In particular, students who, on the basis of their low aptitude scores, might have been expected to get relatively low grades, but who earned high grades instead, clearly tended to seek medical attention less frequently than any other group of students

Academic achievement · Agency (philosophy) · Aptitude · Developmental psychology · Mathematics education · Medical education · Healthcare professionals’ stress and burnout · Higher Education Research Studies · Medical Education and Admissions · Medicine · Psychology · Social Psychology