ANALYSIS OF CRITERIA FOR GRADUATE ADMISSIONS IN SPEECH-LANGUAGE PATHOLOGY - PREDICTIVE UTILITY OF APPLICATION MATERIALS

Evaluations of applicants to most university speech and hearing progra ms rely on quantitative measures such as undergraduate grade point ave rages (UGPA) and scores on the aptitude portions of the Graduate Recor d Examinations (GREs), However, the ability of these factors to predic t success of students pursuing master's degrees in speech-language pat hology has not been verified. In an effort to select the students who are most likely to excel in our graduate program, an analysis of facto rs used to evaluate applications to our master's program was undertake n. Information was extracted from records of students enrolled in the Indiana University MA program in speech-language pathology between 199 2 and 1995. Students chosen for this analysis were considered to be am ong the top or bottom students in their class, as measured by final gr aduate GPA and scores on the PRAXIS examination. A discriminant analys is was performed using UGPA, scores on the verbal, quantitative, and a nalytical subtests of the GREs, undergraduate university, and undergra duate major as input variables. This analysis indicated that students' achievement in a master's program could be predicted with 93% accurac y on the basis of UGPA alone. By contrast, when GRE scores were used t o calculate the discriminant function, classification accuracy reached only 63%. A cross-validation analysis classified a second group of ra ndomly selected students with 80% accuracy. The results of the current investigation are compared to studies in other disciplines that indic ate limited utility of GRE scores in the prediction of students' succe ss in master's degree programs.