2015/01/01 by Inge T. L. Schwager · 1 voice
Medicine · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Medical Education and Admissions #Education, Achievement, and Giftedness #Teacher Professional Development and Motivation
paper · pdf · doi:10.26481/dis.20151125is
openalex publication_date 2015/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/03/25
Although past behavior is a valid predictor of future behavior Students' mobility has considerably increased between European countries. In the Netherlands, for instance, the amount of foreign students has grown by 28 percent (45 thousand students from abroad) between Thus, applying students come from a broad range of countries using markedly different grading systems and differing in the leniency and strictness of grades. As a consequence, U-GPAs are hardly comparable to each other, lack objectivity and may thereby lead to unfair selection decisions. An obvious solution for European universities to select well-suited master students would be to adopt internationally established standardized tests assessing cognitive skills that predict future academic success. A major advantage of standardized tests is that they allow for a direct comparison of knowledge and academic potential of students with different educational backgrounds. Over the last four decades, a solid amount of literature has accumulated, documenting the validity of standardized tests as predictors of graduate school performance Most of this research has been conducted in the United States, where the majority of institutions use standardized tests to select their graduate students. European institutions, in contrast, have rarely been using information from standardized tests to make selection decisions at the graduate level. Consequently, evidence on the validity of standardized tests for selection of graduate students is still scarce in Europe. Validity evidence obtained in the United States, however, should not be generalized to other cultures and countries without further testing, as cultural differences and differences in educational systems may affect validities of selection methods It is therefore necessary to investigate the validity of standardized tests in the context of Europe, in order to assess the utility of such methods for graduate student selection at European universities. Therefore, the first aim of this dissertation is to investigate the predictive validity of a well-established cognitive test in order to predict students' task performance in the European context.