A preliminary study of multiple college admission criteria in Taiwan: the relationship among motivation, standardized tests, high school achievements, and college success

ABSTRACT

A new college admission policy will be implemented in Taiwan in 2022. The purpose of this study was to understand the relationship between admission criteria and college success. Data was obtained from the Taiwan Higher Education Database; a sample size of 8443 students from 156 universities was used in this study. By using the structural equation model, this study tested a research model that included factors such as motivation, standardized test scores, high school achievements, and college success. The findings revealed that the General Scholastic Ability Test scores (in Chinese, English, Social Studies) and high school average academic grades are significantly associated with college success. A student’s motivation to complete a certain major can significantly predict the quality of student effort and influence college success. These findings highlight the importance of some admission criteria and provide practical implications for educational policy-makers, school administrators, students, and parents.

KEYWORDS:

• College admission
• indicators
• motivation
• engagement
• college success

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Tzu-Ling Hsieh http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0195-3554

Notes

1. There are total five test subjects in the GSAT: Chinese, English, Math, Social studies, and science.

2. Listwise deletion was used to work with missing data. Individuals in the database were deleted from the analysis if they were missing data on the variables required for the analysis. Listwise deletion was used because the initial descriptive analysis showed that 90% of missing data comprised of completely unanswered questionnaires. The final sample size comprised 8843 individuals.

3. This study tested the correlation between high school grade and high school class rank (r = 0.477) to make sure there is no serious multi-collinearity issue.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan.