The leved if importance that student attached to getting good grades is higher and the level of their graduate aspirations lower at the time of their entry into college than at any other time in their Freshman year. Attitudinal change among college Freshmen during their first seven weeks of college experience seems sufficiently rapid and pervasive as seriously to question the validity of any single observation as being representative of Freshmen, or at least to require fairly exact dating of such an obsevation. The Freshman changes in grades evaluation and graduate aspiration seem to result from two kinds of peer-group influence-different in direction and in relevance. A special sociometric technique enables empirical differentiation between the primary agents of peer influence on college Freshmen's attitudes thoward their present lives as students, on the one hand, and on Freshmen's attitudes towar their future, adult lives, on the other.
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Walter L. Wallace (1964) studied this question.