Development of a situational judgment test as a predictor of college student performance

Abstract

It has been suggested that tacit knowledge may be a good predictor of performance in college. The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which a situational judgment test developed to measure tacit knowledge correlates with predictors and indicators of college performance. This situational judgment test includes eight situations relevant to the life of college (undergraduate) students and is comprised of 211 behavioral strategies. Four hundred forty-eight college students participated in the study. The results of this study suggest that tacit knowledge has small, statistically nonsignificant correlations with cumulative grade point average (GPA), the percentage of the academic requirements passed on the first attempt, cognitive abilities, achievement motivation, and attention. However, tacit knowledge was found to correlate moderately with the personality factor of agreeableness. The findings do not support claims about the importance of tacit knowledge in academic settings and question what tacit knowledge really is and if it is a useful construct for performance prediction. © 2016, © The Author(s) 2016.