The process of determining class rank does not help students achieve more or reach higher levels of proficiency. Evidence indicates ranking students may diminish students' motivation. High school educators argue that they are compelled to rank-order graduating students because selective colleges and universities require information about…

The Texas 10% law states that students who graduated among the top 10% of their high school class are guaranteed admission to public universities in Texas. We estimate the causal effects of this admissions guarantee on a sequence of connected decisions: students' application behavior, admission decisions by the university, students' enrollment…

The cost of attending college has risen steadily over the past 30 years, making financial aid an important determinant of college choice for many students and a subject of concern for colleges and state governments. In this paper, we estimate the effect of rule-based merit aid assignment on students' enrollment decisions at the University of Iowa.…

Roughly one third of all U.S. high school graduates do not enroll in college soon after earning a diploma. There are many reasons why students do not do so, including work obligations, affordability concerns and lack of academic preparation. Yet research suggests that many of these students often aspire to a college education. Helping these…

This paper describes the implementation of a university-wide initiative aimed at providing a holistic view of a student's academic standing by conducting early, formative assessment for all first-year students. It tracks the Early Assessment System as a student support intervention at Stellenbosch University and suggests that the system has been…

Results from prior research indicate that a student's academic self-concept is negatively influenced by the achievement of others in his or her school (a frame of reference effect) and that this negative frame of reference effect is not or only slightly reduced by the quality, standing, or prestige of the track or school attended (a "reflected…

This study examines service-learning participation and religiosity for their effect on structural and individualistic attributions for poverty. Research on these factors is either insufficient or nonexistent. The data for this study come from a random sample of college students in a Southeastern state. Results indicate that participation in a…

New Leaders for New Schools, a nonprofit organization committed to training school principals, heads the Effective Practices Incentive Community (EPIC), an initiative that offers financial awards to effective educators. Through this initiative, New Leaders offers financial awards to educators in two urban school districts and a consortium of…

The competitiveness of National Collegiate Association (NCAA) schools increases in intensity each year. With the increased pressure on college sport staffs to be undefeated season after season, coaches have to find ways to keep players happy; to do this, they have to find factors that contribute to unify the players. It is nearly impossible to…

This study examines the differences in undergraduate library use by academic discipline at Oregon State University (OSU). In the winter of 2006, an online questionnaire about physical and virtual library use was distributed to 3,227 OSU undergraduates; 949 responses were received. Chi-square tests were used to distinguish differences between user…

This study identified factors that were potential predictors of student completion in a collegiate honors program, evaluated the relative predictive importance of these factors, and used them to describe how the completion groups differed. Records were examined from 336 freshman honors program participants at a large, Midwestern, public…

This paper presents survey data concerning the procedure for determining Class Rank and Valedictorian status at 232 of the 500 largest public high school districts in the United States. These data are analyzed to consider whether or not districts are currently employing methodologies that provide students with appropriate incentives and provide…

Honors and advanced placement (AP) courses are commonly viewed as more demanding than standard high school offerings. Schools employ a range of methods to account for such differences when calculating grade point average and the associated rank in class for graduating students. In turn, these statistics have a sizeable impact on college admission…

Based on the Gaussian model, methods for using measurements that depend on the true attribute to compute rankings are proposed and compared. Measurements based on an empirical Bayes model produce estimates that differ from ranking observed data. Ranking methods are illustrated with school achievement data. (TJH)

The present study investigates pre-business students' reaction to Activity Based Learning in a lower division core required course entitled Introduction to Global Business in the business curriculum at California State University Chico. The study investigates students' preference for Activity Based Learning in comparison to a more traditional…