Search

This meta-analysis assesses the predictive validity of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) across outcome variables, including grade point average, for graduate students. In addition to aggregate effects, this paper also assessed changes in observed effects over time as related to increasing diversity in the graduate student population and as a function of gender and racial/ethnic composition of study samples. Framed using a lens of critical whiteness, this analysis examined n = 1,659 individual effects across k = 201 studies. Overall, 62.3% of reported effects were nonsignificant (i.e. no predictive value of GRE scores on student outcomes). Further, the magnitude of observed predictive relationships decreased significantly over time. The aggregate mean effect across all studies and outcomes was small, significant, and positive: GRE score predicted 3.24% of variance across measured outcomes, 4% of variance in overall GPA, and 2.56% of variance in first-year graduate GPA. Sample composition effects by race/ethnicity were notable under some conditions, but nonsignificant, with increasing proportions of people of Color within a study sample associated with poorer predictive validity for GPA. Likewise, the magnitude of negative effects where lower GRE scores predicted stronger student outcomes showed increasing trends from 0.16% of variance for all-white samples to 7.3% for samples comprised entirely of people of Color. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Doctoral student recruitment is a dynamic, complex, and under-researched phenomenon. There is steep competition between programs for recruiting students with large amounts of resources at stake, especially within the STEM fields, and programs do not operate in isolation within such environments. In this paper, we explore how graduate programs position themselves relative to other programs as they recruit STEM doctoral students. Drawing from 47 interviews with graduate program leaders, 49 interviews with graduate students, and 63 questionnaire responses from graduate program staff and administrators, this research analyzes common recruitment practices of STEM doctoral programs alongside student perspectives about their decision processes. We reveal how competitive forces may lead programs to adopt non-evidence-based recruitment strategies that may not align with either program leaders' stated values or students' priorities. Although program leaders expressed the importance of students prioritizing academic factors in their decisions, our data revealed that programs commonly utilize financial resources as their main recruitment mechanism in practice. By demonstrating this incongruence, our paper aims to illuminate a potential blind spot so programs might choose to change seemingly institutionalized processes that may be out of alignment with their own stated values and those of the students they are seeking to recruit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our understanding of how social identities matter is greatly enhanced by paying attention to the contexts in which these identities develop. The academy is one critical context in which social identities matter (Ostrove & Cole, 2003; Stewart & Dottolo,2005). In this paper we endeavor to show how an important but understudied (Frable, 1997) dimension of social identity-social class-has implications for the extent to which graduate students are interested in becoming faculty members at top research universities. Specifically,we examine the extent to which graduate students' social class backgrounds structure a sense of belonging in graduate school, and the relation between that sense of belonging and graduate students' academic self-concept. We examine the ways in which all three of these variables(social class background, sense of belonging, and academic self-concept),as well as gender, inform graduate students' career goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]