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THE ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE OF THE SCHOLARS

One of the basic questions raised by the Program for Early Admission to College was: How would the Scholars do academically, in view of their comparative youth and their less than normal high school preparation?

A preliminary answer to this question was given in Bridging the Gap Between School and College, published in the summer of 1953, which reported on the freshman year performance of the first group of Scholars. Briefly summarized, the preliminary results showed that the 1951 Scholars had outperformed not only their classmates, but also their Comparison students.

Now that four Scholar groups have entered the program and two have graduated, the evidence confirms and strengthens the preliminary findings.

Footnotes

Footnote :

1 Some complications need to be reckoned with in interpreting the data in this chapter. Shimer, for example, did not establish Comparison groups and it deliberately selected Scholars with a wide range of academic aptitudes. At Fisk, the freshman and sophomore grades of the 1951 and 1952 groups of Scholars were not compared to the grades of the Comparison students because the Scholars took different kinds of courses. Finally, there was no formally designated "freshman class" at Chicago in 1951, so it was not possible to compare Scholar grades with Comparison student grades in that year.

GRADE-POINT AVERAGES

It should probably come as no surprise that academically the Scholars as a group outperformed their classes as a whole by a wide margin. But offhand, one might expect the Comparison students to do better than the Scholars, in view of their advantage in age and high school preparation. This has not been the

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