<p>Noimagination, so you want to play the academic research game, do you? I’m happy to oblige, for it’s one that I sadly know all too well.</p>
<p>The first thing I would say is that the journal in which it was published - Sociology of Education - ain’t exactly the highest level of journal. Furthermore, having only 33 citations (according to Web of Science) or 74 (according to Google Scholar) after 10 years means that your paper isn’t exactly having a great impact in academia. </p>
<p>But secondly and far more importantly, the paper cannot be interpreted in the way you have described. A serious shortcoming of the paper is that it never establishes causality, a flaw that unfortunately seems to behave much (probably most) of the sociology literature. All that the paper can assert is that there is a positive correlation between GPA and their construct of “academic ethic” without actually establishing the causal link between them. It is entirely plausible - and indeed has been discussed in the literature - that poor grades may actually cause a decline in academic ethic, as students may simply lose hope and stop studying, as they may figure that they’re never going to get a top grade anyway, so why bother trying, and may even start drinking (which is a negatively-weighted component of the authors construct of “academic ethic”). Let’s face it - if you’re constantly receiving poor marks no matter how hard you study, your enjoyment of studying will probably decline. That GPA and “academic ethic” are both cause and effect of each other seems also to be a strong possibility. </p>
<p>Which also then leads to the highly plausible alternative story that the true academic construct to be measured is personal confidence. Hence, even if we accept that GPA is indeed only purely the result and never the cause of any student behavior (which is questionable), GPA may actually be caused not be “academic ethic”, but rather by the omitted variable of personal confidence which actually causes higher GPA and is positively correlated (and indeed perhaps causes) “academic ethic”. </p>
<p>Barring a difficult-to-run field experiment, the gold standard of methodological tools for pinning down causality and ruling out omitted variables is to identify an instrumental variable. One I might suggest is, because “academic ethic” is partially measured by refraining from alcohol, perhaps one could identify those particular students who are unlikely to consume alcohol regardless of how poor their grades are, perhaps because of physical intolerance, strongly-held religious views, or other such means. {The problem is that I suspect that such an IV would probably be weak because of the relatively small sample size of the study.} Even if the authors couldn’t identify an IV, they could have at least gathered survey data over multiple (or at the very least two time periods in order to build a panel where they could at least regress GPA onto the lagged academic ethic regressor variables, and attempt to argue causality that way (perhaps with proximity matching based on their MDS model to attempt to eliminate omitted variables). They didn’t even do that. </p>
<p>Without that analysis, figure 4’s path analysis model is not particularly meaningful, as the causality arrow directions are then simply assumed, but never actually demonstrated.</p>
<p>But even if you do accept everything that the authors said, their results do not support anything more than a mild relationship between “academic ethic” and GPA. The regression model of Table 4 explains only 32% of the variance in GPA , and while the table doesn’t show any delta-values, judging from the significance values, differences in student “academic ethic” surely cannot explain any more than 10% of the total variance in GPA. Hence, a whopping 90% of the variance in student GPA has nothing to do with “academic ethic”, and nearly 70% of the total variance in GPA has nothing to do with any of the variables at hand.</p>
<p>You also have to keep in mind, I never said anything about being weeded out of Delaware entirely. I was simply talking about being weeded out of Delaware chemical engineering. I’m sure that somebody who could get into a top school probably could graduate from some major at Delaware, just not necessarily from ChemE. That may not have even necessarily have to do with flunking out the major. Just getting lower grades than they’re used to getting tends to cause students to “weed themselves” out of engineering. For example, if you were a superstar straight A high school student who was good enough to get into Harvard, but chose Delaware for the chemical engineering program, only to be stuck earning B’s and C’s in your engineering classes, you might choose to leave the program even though you are passing, just because your grades are not as good as you’re used to. </p>
<p>But with only B’s and C’s on your transcript, no respectable school will want to take you as a transfer applicant. Harvard certainly won’t. They won’t care that you had been admitted before as a freshman. All they’ll see is that you’re not performing well now, and they won’t care why. That’s the problem. So now you’re stuck at Delaware, and you’re no longer even in the chemical engineering major that you chose Delaware over Harvard for in the first place. Now you’re probably wishing you could take back that choice of turning down Harvard…but it’s too late.</p>
<p>Personally, I think what should happen is that engineering programs (and other difficult majors) should simply cancel the corresponding grades of those students who leave the program. If the guy isn’t going to major in engineering anyway, who cares what his engineering grades are? Let him walk away with a clean slate. Let him apply, if he wants, as a transfer applicant to other schools with a clean academic record. But they won’t do it. Engineering programs seem to actually delight in sadistically punishing students, even those who have left the program.</p>