Composite Measures of Academic Performance: Insights from General Systems Performance Theory

Quantitative characterization of academic performance and competency have been topics of interest at all educational levels.Efforts generally include tests within major subject categories such as math, reading, and science with the diversity of categories increasing at higher educational levels.Such tests result in a score (for individuals or aggregated across individuals) for each category that is intended to reflect "performance"; i.e., a level of competency or mastery within the defined subject matter area (SMA).While individual SMA scores are used as part of individual and group performance reports, single number "overall performance" metrics are frequently also used.Such composite measures have traditionally been based on simple or weighted averaging.General Systems Performance Theory (GSPT) suggested a fundamentally different, more conceptually sound, and intuitively attractive approach, based on the notion of a performance capacity envelope and computation of its volume.This paper presents the application this approach to the issue of composite measure formation in education contexts using realistic, illustrative example cases.It is argued that the quantitative "amount" of academic performance capacity that is the intended characteristic of interest is more accurately reflected with the GSPT-based approach.