Vocational Psychology: Its Problems and MethodsHollingworth, Harry L. (Harry Levi)
Science
Vocational Psychology: Its Problems and Methods
Hollingworth, Harry L. (Harry Levi)
Psychophysiology
Referring to these results, Nicholson remarks, "From this study of the
careers of sixteen hundred and sixty-seven graduates, living and dead,
where three different methods are employed in determining distinction in
after life, it appears that the results are fairly constant, and we are
justified in assuming that, for this college at least, the chances of
distinction for a high honor graduate, one of the two or three leading
scholars of the class, are just even; that one out of three of those
elected to Phi Beta Kappa is likely to achieve pronounced success in life;
and that each of the remaining members of the class has less than one
chance in ten to become famous. In other words, roughly speaking, the
quarter (or the fifth) of the class elected to Phi Beta Kappa are likely to
supply just as many distinguished men as are the remaining three-quarters
(now four-fifths) of the class."
The study of Nicholson includes only that type of success which would be
likely to lead to inclusion in _Who's Who_, viz., the more strictly
literary, professional, political, and academic success. The commercial,
industrial and business careers are not so likely to lead to inclusion in
this directory, and yet success in them is no less definite than in the
professional work. It is rather difficult to determine the degree to which
success in these fields is determined by ability alone, and to what degree
it is a function of chance, inheritance, social charm, prestige, and
geographical and economic circumstance. Nevertheless it would be
interesting to know whether such measure of success as can be secured
correlates in any way with success in the work of school years.
In an unpublished study of the graduates of Pratt Institute, Dr. D. E. Rice
has compared the grades achieved by students in the courses in Mechanical
Engineering and Electrical Engineering with the salaries the men were
receiving several years after graduation. There were in all six classes of
men, numbering about forty each--three classes from Mechanical Engineering
and three from Electrical Engineering, for the years of 1907, 1908, 1909.
The salary reports were asked for in 1913, four to six years after
graduation.
The men were ranked according to the grades they received in the eight
different subjects included in the curriculum, the grades being 10, 9, 8,
and 7, corresponding to the ordinary grade system of A, B, C, D. They were
then ranked according to the salary reported at the time of the
investigation. Results for each class were treated separately so that the
time elapsing since graduation was not a factor in the results. The
following table gives the results when these two rankings were correlated
by two statistical methods of computing correlation.
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