This essay examines the use of grade point average (GPA) in initial college screening. Therefore the following questions should be answered: if personnel administrators are recruiting on campus, does GPA play a role in gaining an invitation for a job interview? And, if so, are there any decision rules, i.e., are only students with very high (or very low, etc.) GPAs invited? Besides taking a short look at the different types of GPA the question of which type of GPA is preferred in college recruiting is addressed. A further question deals with the consistency of the use of decision rules, i.e., are decision rules consistent within an organization or within certain job types (for example engineers)? And finally, the influence of the size of the applicant pool regarding the use of GPA as a screening device is examined.
To answer these questions McKinney, Carlson, Mecham, D’Angelo and Connerley examined 1156 jobs offered by different organizations and published their results in the essay “Recruiters’ use of GPA in Initial Screening Decisions: Higher GPAs don’t always make the cut”. This essay was first published in the journal “Personnel Psychology” in 2003, and is the one that is mainly quoted in this term paper. Other essays will also be mentioned in comparing the results of the essays.
Following this overview of the term paper there is a short review of the current state of research. Then the main article including its methods and results is summarized. Finally, there is a discussion dealing with the questions if GPA really is a valid screening device and if there are other devices that are better or equal. Last, there are some suggestions for future research and a take-home message.
Table of contents
1. Introduction
1.1. Overview
1.2. State current of research
2. Do higher GPAs always make the cut?
2.1. Method
2.2. Results
3. Discussion
Table of contents
List of tables
List of abbreviations
References
List of tables
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Abbreviations
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1. Introduction
1.1. Overview
This essay examines the use of grade point average (GPA) in initial college screening. Therefore the following questions should be answered: if personnel administrators are recruiting on campus, does GPA play a role in gaining an invitation for a job interview? And, if so, are there any decision rules, i.e., are only students with very high (or very low, etc.) GPAs invited? Besides taking a short look at the different types of GPA the question of which type of GPA is preferred in college recruiting is addressed. A further question deals with the consistency of the use of decision rules, i.e., are decision rules consistent within an organization or within certain job types (for example engineers)? And finally, the influence of the size of the applicant pool regarding the use of GPA as a screening device is examined.
To answer these questions McKinney, Carlson, Mecham, D’Angelo and Connerley examined 1156 jobs offered by different organizations and published their results in the essay “Recruiters’ use of GPA in Initial Screening Decisions: Higher GPAs don’t always make the cut”. This essay was first published in the journal “Personnel Psychology” in 2003, and is the one that is mainly quoted in this term paper. Other essays will also be mentioned in comparing the results of the essays.
Following this overview of the term paper there is a short review of the current state of research. Then the main article including its methods and results is summarized. Finally, there is a discussion dealing with the questions if GPA really is a valid screening device and if there are other devices that are better or equal. Last, there are some suggestions for future research and a take-home message.
1.2. State current of research
Former research showed that recruiters do use GPA in screening decisions because there is some evidence that GPA is a indication of job performance (ρ = 0.32) (Roth, BeVier, Switzer & Schippmann, 1996). But they also found that using cutoff scores has certain disadvantages, because there are differences in GPAs between ethnic groups. When using these cutoff scores, the success ratios will only be around 0.32, but following the 4/5th-rule they should be 0.80 if the GPA cutoff score is valid (Roth & Bobko, 2000).
Further research found that students, career counselors, and recruiters think that GPA plays a role in initial screening decisions and some studies even indicate that the decisions makers use GPA but none of these studies examines the decision making process.
Results of these studies indicate that GPA is not the main screening device and its influence varies across different job types. Furthermore they found that the correlation between GPA and screening outcome decreases if other aspects, like degree or work experience are considered.
There might be negative outcomes for organizations using GPA cutoff scores because of its validity and the fact that no one really knows the exact role GPA plays in screening decisions. Thereby it is necessary to find out which GPA devices are used and how they are used.
2. Do higher GPAs always make the cut?
The following part is a summary of the study by McKinney et al. (2003). First the methods used are described, including study design, measures, and analyses. After that the results will be reported.
2.1. Method
The study examines the initial screening decisions made by recruiters. The researchers screened the resumes that were handed in by students at a southeastern university between September 1998 and May 1999. The students applied for at least one of the 1156 jobs offered by different organizations. The study focused on the recruiters’ decision making process and examined which of the resumes led to on-campus interviews after being reviewed by the recruiter. Therefore, decision sets were built consisting of one certain job and all the applications handed in for it. This was done for each of the 1156 posted jobs. In measuring the correlation between GPA and screening outcome (i.e., the invitation for an interview) point biserial correlations were used. In order to reduce the sampling error, only decision sets where at least 50 applications were handed in and where at least 10% of the resumes have led to an invitation for an on-campus interview were considered. 548 decisions sets fulfilled these criteria (59,173 of 93,794 resumes) and so, in the end 2319 students were interviewed. The examined measures include the reported GPA and the screening outcome. In most of the resumes an overall GPA was reported, i.e. a GPA of all coursework done within the studies, but sometimes there was “only” an in-major GPA reported. It was also possible that both GPA types were reported. The existing data does not show which type of GPA the recruiters used during their decision making process, so four possible measures have to be considered:
- GPA(O): only overall GPA was used as screening device
- GPA(I): only in-major GPA was used
- GPA(O+): overall GPA was preferred but if it was not reported in-major GPA was used
- GPA(I+): in-major GPA was preferred but if it was not reported overall GPA was used as screening device.
The first step of the analysis was to find out the point biserial correlations for each of the decision sets before using meta-analytical techniques that aggregate the overall correlation across all of the considered decision sets. To avoid range restriction artifacts the authors subsequently carried out range restriction corrections by using the average standard deviation which was found for each GPA across the decision sets. Furthermore the authors tried to avoid selection ratio artifacts by eliminating decision sets with selection ratios less than 10%, i.e. those decision sets that varied most from a rectangular distribution. Nevertheless differences in the selection ratios do remain and so it seems that there are differences in the correlations across the decision sets, although there are not. That is why each individual correlation was corrected to its counterpart and then reattenuated onto a 25/75-split. This then matches the average 25% total selection ratio within the sample.
2.2. Results
The final sample consisted of 59173 resumes of which 65% reported an overall GPA; 39% for in-major GPA and 27% for both types of GPA. Students that did not report any GPA data were excluded from this study.
On a GPA scale ranging from 1.0 to 4.0 the means for the different GPA types are around 3.25. Compared to data for all university seniors this data has high means and low standard deviations.
The researchers found that in-major GPAs have stronger correlations with screening decisions than overall GPAs and therefore – if available – a stronger association with screening outcomes.
Table 1 provides a detailed description of the relationship between GPA and screening outcome. GPA(O+) is not listed because it does not differ significantly from GPA(O). The first unexpected finding of this table is that the highest GPA score never has the highest success ratio. The highest success ratios are found within a GPA score between 3.01 and 3.75. This suggests that recruiters do not systematically decide for students with the best GPA score but look for other “skills”. Another interesting result is that students that did not report any GPA at all are more likely to be invited for an on-campus interview than students with GPA lesser than 2.76. This again is some evidence for the assumption that other aspects (like work experience, soft skills, …) are considered and GPA only plays a miner role in recruiting decisions – especially if one assumes that students that do not report GPA probably have a low GPA score. With the background that generally one would expect recruiters to go for high GPAs, not reporting low GPAs but emphasizing other skills might be interpreted as smart.
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Table 1: Percentage of resumes in different GPA ranges that resulted in an on-campus interview
Source: McKinney et al, 2003
A further unexpected finding was negative correlations within the distribution of the corrected point biserial correlations across the different GPA. This again indicates recruiters’ decisions against high GPAs. Besides, the magnitudes of these associations vary considerably, which is a cue for recruiters using GPA data in different ways. In order to understand and further examine the variability in the magnitudes, the authors created bivariate plots, where they lined up the students that were invited for an on-campus interview and those that have not been invited throughout the GPA values in GPA(I+) data. Table 2 shows the discovered plot types.
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- Citation du texte
- Sabine Valtenmeier (Auteur), 2006, The Use of GPA in Initial College Screening, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/72760
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