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New Perspectives on the Correlation of SAT Scores, High School Grades, and Socioeconomic Factors
Author(s) -
Zwick Rebecca,
Greif Green Jennifer
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
journal of educational measurement
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.917
H-Index - 47
eISSN - 1745-3984
pISSN - 0022-0655
DOI - 10.1111/j.1745-3984.2007.00025.x
Subject(s) - socioeconomic status , psychology , grading (engineering) , correlation , family income , developmental psychology , mathematics education , demography , mathematics , sociology , population , political science , geometry , civil engineering , law , engineering
In studies of the SAT, correlations of SAT scores, high school grades, and socioeconomic factors (SES) are usually obtained using a university as the unit of analysis. This approach obscures an important structural aspect of the data: The high school grades received by a given institution come from a large number of high schools, all of which have potentially different grading standards. SAT scores, on the other hand, can be assumed to have the same meaning across high schools. Our analyses of a large national sample show that, when pooled within‐high‐school analyses are applied, high school grades and class rank have larger correlations with family income and education than is evident in the results of typical analyses, and SAT scores have smaller associations with socioeconomic factors. SAT scores and high school grades, therefore, have more similar associations with SES than they do when only the usual across‐high‐school correlations are considered .