Purpose: Graduate admission has become a critical process for quality assurance in tertiary education. Hitherto, most research has investigated the validity of admissions instruments. However, surprisingly little work has been conducted on the overall organization of admission, which often remains "informal, ad hoc, and lacking in…

Tasks are the most visible element in an educational assessment. Their purpose, however, is to provide evidence about targets of inference that cannot be directly seen at all: what examinees know and can do, more broadly conceived than can be observed in the context of any particular set of tasks. This paper concerns issues in an assessment design…

Discusses whether scores achieved by college seniors on standardized tests such as Graduate Record Examination can express collegiate value added (knowledge, skills, and abilities added to students during undergraduate studies). Encourages professional organizations to serve as forums to arrive at consensus on how to explain efficacy of…

This report examines the belief that education administration (EA) has attracted students of below-average verbal, quantitative, and analytic scores, as measured by standardized tests. The paper makes two assertions: principals as school leaders need academic credibility to relate with teachers as "critical friends," and successful…

A wide variety of potential indicators of graduate student performance are reviewed. Based on research literature, experience with recent and current research projects, and conversations with graduate faculty members and administrators, the various indicators are considered in two ways. First, they are analyzed within the framework of the…

This study examined the factor structure of the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) General Test to appraise the extent to which an analytical factor could be identified that was distinguishable from verbal and quantitative factors. Full-information factor analysis was employed in several groups of undergraduate majors on items from one edition of…

The aim of this study was to develop a procedure that could be used to appraise the cognitive features of subject (achievement) tests. Cognitive taxonomies and an accompanying coding scheme were developed and applied to the Graduate Record Examinations subject tests in Psychology and Literature in English. The taxonomies were based on the manifest…

Defines assessment as finding out where the problems are in a program for the purpose of eliminating them. Presents a method for developing a formal assessment plan in history including principles of assessment, program goals, and objectives. Suggests determining what is already done and what further assessment methods are desired. (DK)

A previous study of new item types for the analytical measure of the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) General Test found that the new items had many factors labeled verbal reasoning, informal reasoning, formal-deductive reasoning, and quantitative reasoning. The present study examined how processing differed for these item types in the context…

This study was designed to analyze the relationship of Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores to applicants' choices of institutions, their admission, and their enrollment. Applicants from four fields were followed up the year after they had taken the GRE tests. Information was obtained about the departments to which the test takers applied and…

Describes the development of a history assessment test by Northeast Missouri State University (Kirksville) faculty. Discusses content, problems with design and cooperation, and theories of assessment testing. Includes sample questions demonstrating the cube plan, a technique that involves using a single question to measure three learning…

Four writing samples were obtained from 638 foreign college applicants who represented three major foreign language groups (Arabic, Chinese, and Spanish), and from 60 native English speakers. All four were scored holistically, two were also scored for sentence-level and discourse-level skills, and some were scored by the Writer's Workbench…