3.4 Attraction and selection of applicants for a doctoral program  (Page 4/7)

Subjective information

The most common subjective data collected for applicants seeking admission to a doctoral program in educational leadership is reference information. Reference information can vary, however, in several ways. The variations have implications for practice as well as for validity.

From a practice perspective, reference information can be either confidential or non-confidential. This choice involving confidentiality is determined by the prospective applicant and must be provided by doctoral programs according to the Family Rights and Privacy Act of 1996 (n.d.) through signatory authority on an official form. Interestingly, regardless of the option chosen by a particular applicant, both confidential and non-confidential reference information must be afforded the same weight by faculty within the admission process.

Beyond confidentiality status, reference information often vary in additional ways that have implications for validity. That is, reference information may be focused on personal or professional characteristics of applicants, may be norm referenced involving comparison with other individuals (ranking technique) or may be criteria referenced involving comparison with external standards (rating technique), may be unstructured as obtained through letters of recommendation or may be structured as assessed by a standardized form, and/or may vary by the content addressed by reference sources. To assess the validity of reference information for delimiting an initial applicant pool for a doctoral program in educational leadership, attention has be afforded to these different ways of variation.

Using actual field data for a particular doctoral program in educational leadership, Young (2005b) assessed the predictive validity for professional reference sources, for a norm referenced system of evaluation, for a standardized format, and for specific content items held constant across all applicants. Specific content addressed in this study are as follows: (a) intellectual ability, (b) educational knowledge, (c) motivational level, (d) research ability, (e) maturity, (f) work habits, (g) problem solving ability, (h) writing ability, and (i) verbal ability. Using a logistic regression procedure, this investigator found that those rejected and those admitted differed only on research ability and work habits when the interrelationship of these predictors were considered in a linear equation.

Objective applicant information

In addition to subjective information collected for applicants seeking admission to a doctoral program in educational leadership, most programs require objective information about applicants. Objective information is assessed generally according to past academic performance and to future academic potential of perspective applicants.

According to Creighton and Jones (2001) as well as to Norton (1994), the academic predictors used by most educational leadership programs are grade-point averages and standardized test scores. Grade point averages are assessed both for undergraduate coursework and for graduate coursework. Collectively, these grade-point averages reflect the past academic performance of potential candidates.