Wrong scholarships awarded; makes no difference

[snopes]

Comment: There's a story that I have read a couple of times over about the
last 20 years or so and which I can't find out if it's true or not. I
think it concerns a US college or university which has a certain number of
scholerships available. They interview the finalists and create a list
that has double the number of scholerships. They then rank the applicants
and take the top half of the applicants and give them the scholerships
while rejecting the rest. Anyway, the story goes that one year they make
a mistake and grant the scholerships to the bottom half of the list and
reject the top half. The error is discovered but the students have already
been granted the scholerships or have already started. The institute in
question then checks their grades at the end of the year or their degree
and discovers that there is no significant difference from what they would
expect if they had picked the top half of the finalists on their list.

[Tootsie Plunkette]

snopes, you made an error in the title of this thread. It should be:
"Wrong scholerships awarded; makes no difference"

I'll let it slide this time.

I could see this be true in that for some scholarships, just about everyone who applies would be "worthy" of the scholarship. There may be 50 people apply, but only 10 slots, so 40 "worthy" people get rejected.

Originally Posted by Doug4.7

I could see this be true in that for some scholarships, just about everyone who applies would be "worthy" of the scholarship. There may be 50 people apply, but only 10 slots, so 40 "worthy" people get rejected.

That's exactly what I was thinking. And in the OP these weren't just applicants, but "finalists". I think I'd be more surprised if there WAS a significant difference in grades in the lower half from what was expected of the upper half...

Having been there myself years ago, usually the difference between winning a major scholarship and being a "runner-up" comes down to how confident you seem in the interview, or what public service projects you've done in High School, etc. At that level, EVERYONE has great GPA potential.

-Tim

[Dr. Dave]

I agree with Doug, it is not as if they looked at the grades of the half that was supposed to be on the "do not admit under any circumstancesm" these were supposedly finalists. Also, merit scholarships are not intended to predict who will have the highest GPA, they are to "entice," for whatever reason, certain students to attend the university.

This sounds like something claimed by someone who did not get a scholarship. One thing we know for certain, the author of this piece was not on the list either way if it was for "excellence in the use of written language."

This story seems to be an attempt to imply that the scholarship (and similar) tests don't reflect the actual academic abilities, i.e. the tests' reliability is low. More broadly, the issue may be that once students are treated as "good" or "bad" ones their achievements will be in accordance with the treatment they receive.
Such experiments have been performed in a controlled environment. One study, IIRC, took essays written by students and randomly assigned to two groups of testers. One group was told that essays A, B & C were written by good students and D, E & F were written by weak students. The second group was told the opposite. In both groups any particular essay was more likely to get a higher mark if the testers were told that the writers were good students, raising the question of reliability in such testing systems.
Another experiment involved a longitudinal study of the pupils’ achievements in an elementary school classroom. The pupils’ reports from previous years were mixed and randomly matched with the pupils’ names before being presented to the (new) teachers in such a manner that there was no relation between the student and his / her academic achievement as presented to the teachers. By the end of the year a close match was found between the each pupil’s achievements in that year and what the teachers were told about that pupil’s ability and a weak match was found between a pupil’s achievements in that year and this / her achievement in previous years, which seems to indicate a differential treatment by the teachers.

(I remember reading about those studies in a social psychology class last year but for the life of me I can't find the reference. Help, anybody?)

[Tarquin Farquart]

Originally Posted by Doug4.7

I could see this be true in that for some scholarships, just about everyone who applies would be "worthy" of the scholarship. There may be 50 people apply, but only 10 slots, so 40 "worthy" people get rejected.

I thought exactly that.

[Bill]

[quote=TheTurtleMoves;216934]Such experiments have been performed in a controlled environment. One study, IIRC, took essays written by students and randomly assigned to two groups of testers. One group was told that essays A, B & C were written by good students and D, E & F were written by weak students. The second group was told the opposite. In both groups any particular essay was more likely to get a higher mark if the testers were told that the writers were good students, raising the question of reliability in such testing systems. QUOTE]

Dopn't have a cite but I remember from business school that this has a name: the "halo effect." One of my business school professors in fact made it a point to fold over the first page of our paper so she wouldn't know who the person was while grading it, thus clearing away any expectations based on the person's class participation and/or prior academic reputation.

Thanks.

Bill

[Johnny Slick]

Originally Posted by snopes

Comment: There's a story that I have read a couple of times over about the
last 20 years or so and which I can't find out if it's true or not. I
think it concerns a US college or university which has a certain number of
scholerships available. They interview the finalists and create a list
that has double the number of scholerships. They then rank the applicants
and take the top half of the applicants and give them the scholerships
while rejecting the rest. Anyway, the story goes that one year they make
a mistake and grant the scholerships to the bottom half of the list and
reject the top half. The error is discovered but the students have already
been granted the scholerships or have already started. The institute in
question then checks their grades at the end of the year or their degree
and discovers that there is no significant difference from what they would
expect if they had picked the top half of the finalists on their list.

collage cost to much money

Okay, seriously. (and this is obviously not directed at snopes but that fool who wrote this) Jesus H. Christ. If you're going to write a NFBSKing rant about college and scholArships, learn to NFBSKing read and spell. I am okay with a couple of random grammatical and/or spelling errors, so long as the presence of error is not the norm. When you fail to achieve this criterion, you just come off as a blithering idiot who has no business ever looking in a direction where a college campus may one day be built, much less talking about them.

[talk2sparky]

Doesn't seem far-fetched. Colleges do make mistakes. I worked with a guy who never heard back from one of the schools he wanted to go to and decided to go somewhere else. He was still curious why he didn't ANY response, so he contacted the school. The school said they HAD accepted him and they had him registered for the fall semester.

Turns out there were 2 applicants with the same exact name. The other guy got both his own rejection letter AND my friend's acceptance letter.

[Fiver]

This may be derailing a little bit, but this recently happened at my high school's award ceremony on the last day. Several people were called up to get different scholarships awarded by the same group. One of the names was someone that no one had heard of, and it's a small school, so everyone knew everyone. The woman, upon discovering that there was no Julia there, gave it to a girl named Julie, but with a totally last name, and said that it was probably for her, even though she had one other scholarship already. These were in cash.