The Importance of and Relationship Between Admissions Criteria for Undergraduate Students and the Management of the Office of Admissions in Seventh-day Adventist Institutions of Higher Education
Problem. The selection and admission of undergraduate students involves the admissions office in the responsibility of maintaining the delicate threefold balance of academic excellence and quality, institutional economic stability, and the provision of educational opportunity for all who wish to benefit by higher education. Obtaining the information necessary for the adequate and proper assessment of an applicant's eligibility for admission couples with attention to good management principles and practices in the office of admissions will strengthen and benefit the entire institution, and also enable the deserving student to obtain the education appropriate to his potential. It was the purpose of the study to analyze the evaluate the admissions criteria and the principles of management of the undergraduate admissions office in the colleges operate by the Seventh-day Adventist Church in North America. Method. The study involved the responses from a population of ninety-eight person involved in the admissions decision, and the responses from fifty-eight person employed in the admissions office. Two instruments were used. The first was designed to assess the relative importance awarded admissions criteria and requirements by admission officers and admissions committee members. The second determined the degree of adherence to accepted admissions office management principles by personal in the admissions office. They hypotheses projected in the study suggested four statistical procedures. The consistency of the responses, within an institution, was tested by an analysis of variance methodology to determine the reliability of the responses. The degree of importance awarded specific admissions criteria and the degree of adherence to specific statements of admissions office management principles were identified by the use of quartile values on all responses to a particular admissions criterion or management statement. Agreement between institutions on admissions criteria and on management principles was obtained by calculating the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient (r) on the means of the responses. Finally, the institutions were ranked with respect to overall consistency of response within each institution on admissions criteria, and for consistency of response within each institution on admissions criteria, and for consistency of responses within each institution on admissions office management principles. Spearman's correlation coefficient (rho) was obtained as a measure of agreement between these two ranking. Results. Ten of twelve institutions met the stated criterion level of .71 on the consistency of response on admissions criteria by respondents in the same institution. Only one institution met the same criterion level on consistency of response on admissions office management principles and practice. On the twenty-nine admissions criteria and requirements assessed, respondents considered one academic and five non-intellective admissions criteria essential to the admissions decision. Of the seventy-nine statements relating to admissions office management principles, full adherence was indicated on forty-six and partial adherence on twenty-nine statements. On admissions criteria, forty-two out of sixty-six pairs of institutions achieved the correlation coefficient criteria level of .71. No pairs of institutions met the correlation coefficient criterion level on admissions office management principles. With a rank-order correlation coefficient of .21, consistency of response of response on the degree of importance awarded admissions criteria bears no relation to consistency of response on the degree of adherence to admissions office management principles in institutions. Conclusions. On the admissions information called for on student application forms, only six of the twenty-nine items or groups of items were regarded as essential to the admissions decision. Admissions offices adhere to the principles of the Wallace model of admissions office management. Good consistency of response in the same institution and agreement on responses between institutions was demonstrated on admissions criteria. Consistency of response in the same institution and agreement on reposes between institutions to statements of admissions office management principles was low. No relations existed between consistency of response on the importance of admission criteria and consistency of response on adherence to statements of admissions office management principles.
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