Vocational Choice and College Grades

Abstract

The student who comes to college to prepare himself for a definite vocational field may have an advantage over the student whose vocational goal is still undecided. The pursuit of such a definite personal objective may be thought to increase the student's incentive to study and may also serve to give meaning and relationship to knowledge and principles. In a previously published study* of this problem the results seemed to indicate that students who had definite vocational choices made higher grades in college than their fellows whose vocational choices were not made. This study, however, had a number of serious weaknesses. It used the ques tionnaire technique to secure data from students. Moreover the questionnaire called for information which could only be obtained by the student by the recall of events, vague and subjective, going back over a period of three or four years. So it seemed desirable to repeat the study starting with a class of incoming freshmen, using the interview rather than the questionnaire, making a comparison after each interview period, and carrying on the study until the students had completed four years of college, when most of them would graduate. The students were all men. In 1937, 270 of them entered college; in 1941, 124 of them completed four years of college work. During each of the four years they were interviewed individually to find out if they had made a choice of a vocation (definitely, tentatively, or not at all) and when the choice was made. To lessen the demands on retrospection these inter views were made during the first semester of the freshman year to find those who had chosen before entering college, near the end of the second semester of the freshman year and at the middle of the sophomore, junior and senior years. Then, for each student, grades for each semester were recorded and averaged and his score on the American Council Psychological Examination, given at entrance to college, was secured.