Lowell's investigation, which is discussed in later paragraphs, also bears directly on the question of the relation between college entrance records, college grades, and later work in professional schools. A rather different method of procedure was adopted by Van Denburg, who studied the relation between the first-term marks of high school pupils in New York City and the length of time the pupils continued in school work. The following table gives a general idea of his results:
SHOWING THE RELATION BETWEEN FIRST-TERM MARKS IN HIGH SCHOOL AND THE LENGTH OF TIME PUPILS REMAIN IN SCHOOL (VAN DENBURG)
------------------------------------------------------------ |Percentage Leaving School in Various Years After | Entrance into the High School First-Term |------------------------------------------------ Mark | Left |Left in 2nd, 3rd, or| |During First |4th Years, or Failed| Graduated | Year |to Graduate in 4th | -----------+-------------+--------------------+------------- Below 50% | 61 | 39 | 0 50 to 59% | 49 | 46 | 5 60 to 69% | 39 | 58 | 3 70 to 79% | 20 | 62 | 18 80 to 89% | 17 | 46 | 37 90 to 100% | 6 | 40 | 54 ------------------------------------------------------------
Thorndike, in referring to the significance of such results, says: "Ten times as many of those marked below 50 leave in the first year as of those marked 90 or above. Of 115 pupils marked below 50 not one remained to graduate in four years. As the marks rise the percentage leaving in the early years steadily falls and the percentage graduating rises. Such prophecies... could easily be worked out for any community. They show that in the important matter of the length of stay in school a pupil's career is far from being a matter of unpredictable fortuity.... It will not be long before [we] will remember with amusement the time when education waited for the expensive tests of actual trial to tell how well a boy or girl would succeed with a given trade, with the work of college and professional school, or with the general task of leading a decent, law-abiding, humane life."
Prompted by Dearborn's study of the relation between work in high school and work in the university, Smith made a somewhat more intensive study of a group of students in the University of Iowa. Dearborn had investigated the academic careers of pupils from eight large and four small high schools in Wisconsin, and concluded that three-fourths of the students entering the university from these high schools would maintain throughout the university approximately the same rank as they had held in high school. When the groups were divided into upper and lower halves, about seventy per cent of those in the upper high school section were found in the upper half of the university section; about the same number of those in the lower high school half were found in the lower university half.