Evolution of admission standards in response to curriculum integration

Abstract

Admission standards are commonly employed as a means of maintaining the quality of an academic program’s student pool, and as a result, the program itself. The past decade has seen a number of efforts to integrate academic content and incorporate models of team‐based learning. While the emphasis and demands of these programs have changed, as well as the expectations of incoming students, admission standards have not. This study considers whether undergraduate business admission requirements developed and validated for traditional curricula remain valid admission standards for integrated programs. The relationship between student performance in various predictor courses and performance in upper level business courses is compared for students in an integrated program and those taking the traditional curriculum. Results indicate that the traditional predictor courses remain valid predictors of performance for the integrated program. Additionally, opportunities for improvement exist in the addition of courses emphasizing communication and reasoning skills.

Admission requirements for transfer and non‐transfer students: should one size fit all?

“…Based on the substantial changes made to the core business requirements for all CBE majors, a re‐evaluation of traditional admission standards seemed prudent. Initial analysis indicated that the existing admission standards no longer provided adequate predictions of student performance when applied to the new IBC program (Lawrence and Pharr, 2003). An interesting artefact of this study was that there appeared to be differences in explanatory power of this admission requirement between transfer and non‐transfer students, thus calling into question the practice of treating these two groups identically.…”

“…Causes for concern often focus on changing levels of performance of those students who have met the admission criteria and cases of significant curricular change (Lawrence and Pharr, 2003). The application of admission standards at the undergraduate level has typically been on a "one-size-fits-all" basis, with no distinction made between different groups of students.…”

“…The use of admission standards is commonplace in academia as a method of identifying and accepting those students most likely to succeed at all levels of higher education (Boyles et al , 2005). For example, business education at the undergraduate level has typically used cut‐off levels of grade performance in discipline‐specific courses as a requirement for admission into the business program and/or advancement to upper‐level business coursework (Lawrence and Pharr, 2003; Geiger and Dangerfield, 1996; Pharr et al , 1993). The development and application of effective admission standards are important for two reasons.…”

“…In many cases, admission standards were developed on the basis of intuitive logic and later tested for validity when questions of efficacy arose (Pharr et al , 1993). Causes for concern often focus on changing levels of performance of those students who have met the admission criteria and cases of significant curricular change (Lawrence and Pharr, 2003). The application of admission standards at the undergraduate level has typically been on a “one‐size‐fits‐all” basis, with no distinction made between different groups of students.…”

Predictors of Academic Achievement and Their Possible Applications

“…In higher education, significant attention to the predictors of academic achievement is motivated by several needs, such as the need to determine admissions criteria (Touron, 1987;Young, 1989;Tickell & Smyrnios, 2005;Holt et al, 2006), evolve admissions criteria to reflect changing programmes (Lawrence & Pharr, 2003), or to identify teaching methods or students' approaches to study (Scouller, 1998;Chemers et al, 2001;Wagner et al, 2001;Harlow et al, 2002;Alfan & Othman, 2005;Handelsman et al, 2005;Giles et al, 2006) that help promote academic achievement. However, analysis of student achievement during the year can be used for many other purposes as well; and these seem not to have been studied before in the literature.…”