I__. - International Military Testing Association

Subjects
Method
The unit of analysis was colleges. Eleven of the lU2 institutions were
eliminated because data on all of the predictors could not be obtained.
This reduced the number of colleges analyzed to 91.
College Measures
College Selectivity. College selectivity was defined as a measure
which captured the prestige of the university as reflected by the talent of
the students attracted and accepted to the college. To measure college
selectivity, the average scores of the entering freshman classon .
standardized tests (the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and the American
College Test (ACT)) were recorded. In addition, the selection ratio of the
college (i.e., percentage of applicants accepted) was computeo.
Educational Environment. Educational environment measures reflecteti
academic experiences provided by the university. Measures were percentage
of graduate students, ratio of students to faculty, percentage of full-time
faculty with PhDs, number of volumes in the library, and yearly dollar value
of endowments.
Procedure
The sources of data for the college selectivity and educational
environment predictors were various published documents reporting suct~
statistics (e.g., American Council on Education, 1983, 1987; The College
Blue Book, 1987; Lehman, 1966; National Center for Educational Statistics,
1987). Data used as criteria reflected the unique contribution of the 41
colleges to the prediction of OTS cadet performance. l'hese values were the
regression weights (b-weights) for the college membership binary variables
from the "best" model in the analytic phase.
Analysis
Regression analyses were used to explore the relative contribution ot‘
the two classes of college charactristics in accounting for the college
effect observed for the seven OTS performance measures. Two models, in
which the b-weights for colleges were regressed on both college selectivity
and educational environment measures (Model 1) and on college selectivity
measures alone (Model 2), were analyzed. These models were designed to test
the hypothesis that the variation in expected performance level observed for
graduates of different colleges was due to college selectivity or the taletlt
of the student body, not to the educational environment. The predictor seis
included binary and product vectors for the SAT and ACT variables in order to
account for the schools (N = 51) which reported only one test score, either
SAT or ACT. The predictive accuracy of the two models was compared tising t!ie
P statistic (p 4.01). If the models differed significantly for a criterion,
stepwise regression analyses 'were also accomplished to identify the most
salient indicators among the available educational environment measures. .%
backward elimination method was used to determine which. educational
environment measures improved predictability (p