Which grades are better, A’s and C’s, or all B’s? Effects of variability in grades on mock college admissions decisions
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2019, Vol 14, Issue 6
Abstract
Students may need to decide whether to invest limited resources evenly across all courses and thus end with moderate grades in all, or focus on some of the courses and thus end with variable grades. This study examined which pattern of grades is perceived more favorably. When judging competency, people give more weight to positive than negative information, in which case heterogeneous grades would be perceived more favorably as they have more positive grades than homogeneous moderate grades. Furthermore, high school students are told to demonstrate their passion in college applications. Nonetheless, people generally overweigh negative information, which can result in a preference for a student with homogeneous grades lacking extremely negative grades. The college admissions decisions in particular may also involve emphasis on long-term stable, consistent, and responsible character, which the homogeneous grades may imply. Study 1 found that laypeople, undergraduate students, and admissions officers preferred to admit a student with homogeneous grades to a college than a student with heterogeneous grades even when their GPAs were the same. Study 2 used a heterogeneous transcript signaling a stereotypic STEM or humanities student, and found that while undergraduate students were more split in their choices, laypeople and admissions officers still preferred a student with homogeneous grades. Study 3 further replicated the preference for a student with homogeneous grades by using higher or lower average GPAs and wider or narrower range of grades for the heterogeneous grades. Possible reasons and limitations of the studies are discussed.
Authors and Affiliations
Woo-kyoung Ahn, Sunnie S. Y. Kim, Kristen Kim and Peter K. McNally
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP678450
- DOI -
- Views 168
- Downloads 0
Nudge to nobesity I: Minor changes in accessibility decrease food intake
Very small but cumulated decreases in food intake may be sufficient to erase obesity over a period of years. We examine the effect of slight changes in the accessibility of different foods in a pay-by-weight-of-food sala...
Developing expert political judgment: The impact of training and practice on judgmental accuracy in geopolitical forecasting tournaments
The heuristics-and-biases research program highlights reasons for expecting people to be poor intuitive forecasters. This article tests the power of a cognitive-debiasing training module (“CHAMPS KNOW”) to improve probab...
Still no compelling evidence that Americans overestimate upward socio-economic mobility rates: Reply to Davidai & Gilovich (2018)
Davidai and Gilovich (2018) contend that (a) Americans tend to think about their nation’s income distribution in terms of quintiles (fifths), and (b) when Americans’ perceptions of socio-economic mobility rates are measu...
The irrational hungry judge effect revisited: Simulations reveal that the magnitude of the effect is overestimated
Danziger, Levav and Avnaim-Pesso (2011) analyzed legal rulings of Israeli parole boards concerning the effect of serial order in which cases are presented within ruling sessions. They found that the probability of a favo...
Recognition-based judgments and decisions: What we have learned (so far)
This special issue on recognition processes in inferential decision making represents an adversarial collaboration among the three guest editors. This introductory article to the special issue’s third and final part come...