Intellectual and Personality Characteristics of University of Utah Students

STAFF MEMBERS and graduate students in the I Counseling Center and Department of Educational Psychology, University of Utah, have gathered a large array of data related to counseling and testing activities. These data have been distributed to the faculty, administration and professional colleagues in a series of Counseling Center reports*, and have formed the basis for a number of administrative and counseling procedures in the General Education program, the Admissions program and in other University of Utah programs. Following is a sum mary of some of the most interesting findings. Al though the findings relate specifically to University of Utah students, it is felt that there may be con siderable generality in the findings which are sig nificant for other college student populations. The typical entering freshman at the University of Utah has an intelligence quotient (IQ) of around one hundred and fifteen, which is about average for American college students in general, but some what lower than the average for state universities. The typical graduating senior has an IQ of around one hundred and twenty-five, although about one graduate in fifty has an IQ below one hundred. How ever, five-sixths of University of Utah graduates come from the top fifth of the general population, intellectually speaking, and very few students ac quire higher professional degrees who do not have an IQ of at least one hundred and twenty. In recent years it has been c us tomary to break down general intelligence into its more specific fac tors. When the typical entering freshman is ana lyzed in this fashion, his strongest a b i lity is rea soning, followed by spatial ability, verbal ability, numerical ability, and finally clerical ability (which is but little better than that for the adult population at large). Those who emerge as graduating seniors are strongest in the area of v e r b a 1 ability, which suggests the crucial role of communications in the curriculum. I But even more important than general intellectual ability in determining who will succeed in this Uni versity are the student's high school record and his entrance test scores. Together they account for a bout half of what goes into college success as mea sured by grades. This raises the general question of the typical student's academic predictability. Pehlke's (6) recent survey indicates that while the typical entering freshman thinks it is agood ideafor us to administer entrance tests, so that he can make what is perhaps an "agonizing self-appraisal "of his scholastic potential, and thus be stimulated to do his best, he does not favor the use of these tests for ad mission purposes. The much more popular opinion is that all high school graduates should be allowed to enter college. This leads to what we may appro priately call our "wash-out" system. It means that while the typical freshman makes a passing average in his first quarter at the university, forty percent of his less typical friends fail to pass the first quar ter. Even more disconcerting is the fact that only a bout one in four of aspiring freshmen manages to graduate. The fact that about eighty-five percent of our graduates come from those freshmen who pass their first quarter in college attests to both the con sistency of students' academic performance and the consistency of their professors' grading practices. As a matter of fact, the entrance test data, combin ed with the high school average, pretty well indicate at the outset whether or not a person will suc c e e d in college. If he earned good grades in high school and achieved a high level of reading, writing and a rithmetic skill, he will most likely continue this pattern of success into college. Based on these cri teria of high school average and entrance test scores, the research indicates that no more than ten percent of the bottom fifth of an e nte r ing class can be expected to graduate, while more than forty percent of the top fifth will graduate.