The use of situational judgment tests in admission to higher education: validity and coaching effects

Medical and dental education in Europe face enormous challenges. Admission is one of them. The number of candidates in both these educations often exceeds the available places. This dissertation provides a first look at the use of a fairly new selection tool in admission procedures for medical and dental education: a situational judgment test. First, a general introduction and overview of the literature on SJTs is given. Next, the setting of the dissertation is described: the admission exam for medical and dental studies in Flanders. Obviously, the selection of medical and dental students in Flanders is different from the admission in other countries. First, the Flemish Admission Exam is exactly the same for both medical and dental students. However, the first study shows that students with a lower score on the cognitive tests, tend to choose dental education. This finding raises questions about using the same admission exam for two different majors. Second, the Flemish admission exam uses an SJT as non-cognitive predictor. SJTs have proven their value in the context of job selection. Studies in both medical and dental education show that SJTs can be valid predictors of both academic and job performance. Over time (from year 1 through year 5/7) the validities of the SJT for predicting academic performance (GPA) slightly increased and there was evidence of incremental validity of the SJT over cognitive ability. The SJT was a predictor of supervisory-rated job performance nine years later. In the last study, the technique of propensity scoring is used to study the coaching effects of both cognitive and non-cognitive tests. By using this technique, treatment-control comparisons can be made among individuals with approximately equal probabilities of having received the treatment. Results show that people who seek coaching were those with the lowest scores on the pretest. Coaching effects were largest for the SJT (d=.50), followed by the knowledge tests (d=.45) and general mental ability test (d=.34). SJTs can be valuable additions to cognitive tests in an admission procedure for higher education. However, the coaching effects found, raise questions about using the same SJT on a long-term basis.

Grantor dc:publisher

Ghent University, Department of Personnel management, work and organizational psychology

Year dc:date

2011

Author dc:creator

• Buyse, Tine

Contributors dc:contributor

• Lievens, Filip

• Social Sciences
• Situational Judgment Tests
• Selection

Statement dc:rights

• info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/1287886
https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/1287886/file/4335607

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:archive.ugent.be:1287886