which had been in the process of development for several years
and which ets
described as "entirely new measures of unusual scope designed to
assess the broad outcomes of education in the liberal arts." These
tests, covering the Humanities, Natural Science, and Social
Science, were aimed far beyond the details of specific courses and
were intended to measure the student's grasp of basic concepts in
the liberal arts and his ability to apply them.
From the
standpoint of the Early Admission experiment, these new tests
offered two distinct advantages: (1) they represented a much
stiffer challenge than existing standardized tests (the Scholars
and Comparisons had been bumping their heads on the ceilings of
these tests), and (2) they made it possible not only to measure the
performance of Scholars and Comparison students at all of the
participating institutions with a uniform yardstick, but also to
compare the performance of both groups with that of students in
other American colleges, as the tests were available to colleges
and universities throughout the country.
Through the
co-operation of ets,
arrangements were made to have the
gre Area Tests
administered to the Scholars and Comparison students in the 12
colleges and universities participating in the Early Admission
experiment. First to take the new tests were the 1952 Scholars and
Comparisons, who were then in their sophomore year. Each Scholar
and Comparison group has taken these tests at least once, and the
1952 Scholars and Comparisons took them twice—first at the
end of sophomore year, and again at the end of senior year. The
1951 Scholars and Comparisons took the tests as seniors, and the
1953 and 1954 Scholars and Comparisons took them as sophomores. It
is planned to have these two latter groups take the tests again as
seniors.
Chart IV
(page 28) summarizes the results of the testings to date. As it
indicates, each group of Scholars outperformed its Comparison
group, both in terms of mean scaled scores and also in terms of the
proportion scoring above 500, which was the estimated mean (average
score) on each test for a "standardization" group of college
seniors.