words, a 16-year-old Scholar with the same aptitude score as an 18-year-old Comparison student may in fact have a higher "real aptitude," and when he reaches 18 will have a higher aptitude score. Most of the colleges did not attempt to compensate for this, as the rate of increase is not sufficiently uniform to permit a reliable adjustment factor. Where an adjustment was made, however, the Scholars, for some unexplained reason, still did better than the Comparison students. For example, Chicago made a special effort to match each 1951 Scholar to a Comparison student whose aptitude score was from three to five points higher. Despite this compensatory arrangement, the grade-point averages attained by the 1951 Scholars were notably higher than those of the 1951 Comparison students in every year, and the Scholars outperformed the Comparisons on the gre Area Tests.

A third explanation is that the Scholars, having left high school and entered college early, did not lose the intellectual momentum that is often lost by able students held fast by the "lock step" in an unchallenging academic environment.

Finally, it has been suggested that the "halo effect" of the experiment itself—the Scholars' awareness that their academic performance was being compared to that of the Comparison students—spurred them on to greater efforts.

In any event, the superior academic performance of all four groups of Scholars demonstrates that the ability to do well in college is not solely a function of chronological age or twelve years of previous preparation.