The Accuracy of Self-Report Information Collected on the ACT Test Battery: High School Grades and Items of Nonacademic Achievement.

This paper reports the accuracy with which students report their high school grades and nonacademic achievements when they write the ACT Test Battery. A sample of 5,775 student records from 134 high schools was studied. The correlations between self-reported and school-reported grades were found to range from .81 to .86. The correlations were examined separately for "overreporters," and "accurate reporters" in terms of a number of student characteristics: ability, race, sex, class rank, parents' income level, students' level of aspiration, and class size. The accuracy with which the self-reported information was collected was stable over income levels, sex, race, and size of class. Students who aspire for less than a bachelor's degree tend to overreport their grades more than students who aspire to at least a bachelor's degree. Students also tend to accurately report their nonacademic achievements. The accuracy of self-report on these items is comparable to that of high school grades, in that accuracy did not seem to vary with student background characteristics. (Author)