Grade Adjustment Methods

The last major review of grade adjustment methods developed to improve the prediction of academic performance is Linn’s 1966 article. Since then, several other statistical methods have been developed and used to make grades from different courses more directly comparable. In several instances, these methods have improved the understanding of the observed phenomena of differential predictive validity for women and for minority students. Each method is based on a different statistical methodology and set of assumptions about the data and tested on a different data set. This article reviews the studies in this area over the past 27 years and discusses this research in the context of selection in admissions and of the prediction of student performance in college.