Advising College Students

T AHE colleges are overcrowded: in spite of the fact that many students are unfitted to do college work, and others are lacking in serious purpose. There are many failures, many withdrawals, and much inattention and waste of time. Those who fail lose their time and money and are discouraged. The presence of many incompetent students lowers the standards of work, crowds classes, uses up equipment and facilities that should be available for capable students, and in many ways lowers the efficiency of the college. Beyond wringing our hands, is there anything we can do about it? Public opinion in the state of Minnesota and legislative enactment in some other states require that the state university be open to all graduates of accredited high schools. Many students graduate from high schools who are unable to go on into the higher work of college. Those who stand in the lowest quartile of their high-school classes have about one chance in fifty of satisfactorily carrying freshman work in college, while about one in eight of those who come from the lower half of their graduating classes do satisfactory work. Until recently nearly as many boys came to us from the lower half-and even from the lowest deciles-of the highschool classes as from the higher deciles. Of the girls a larger proportion came from the higher levels of scholarship, but even among them the selection is much less marked than it should be. Here is the first and chief reason for the failure of students in college: those who have done highschool work poorly cannot be expected to carry the more difficult work of the college. How are the capable students to be selected and how are the incapable ones to be deterred from coming, especially in view of the present state of public opinion? By a combination of high-school record and psychological tests developed since I 9 1 7 we have arrived at a rating of college aptitude which dependably serves some purposes of student selection. The details of the procedure have been described elsewhere.' Suffice it to say here that, while the high-school record is the most reliable single measure of aptitude for college work, the combination of this with the tests gives a better basis for prediction than either one alone. The rating in college aptitude is expressed in a percentile scale in which each student is assigned his approximate rank among any one hundred Freshmen chosen at random

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• Factors affecting college grades

  Diane Harris•Psychological Bulletin•1940

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