Graduate pre-selection: A research note

Information about educational, work and leisure achievements discriminated between graduate application forms which were accepted for further consideration and those which were rejected, as did personal background features and style of completion of the application form. Variation between types of organization, individual organizations and selectors from the same organization was observed.     

A METHOD FOR SCALING VERBAL DISQUALIFICATION

A disqualification is a message that says something “without really saying it”—one that is evasive, indirect, or effectively ambiguous in some other way. This article describes the rationale for, and development of, an objective method for measuring the degree of disqualification in brief written messages: nonexpert judges independently assess four basic elements of the message (sender, content, receiver, context) for ambiguity, by use of a physical scale of length. The raw scale values are standardized for each judge, and the reliability of these values is quite high. Research uses of the method, as well as its limitations and possible modifications, are discussed.     

EFFECTS OF STANDARD EXTREMITY ON MIXED STANDARD SCALE PERFORMANCE RATINGS1

It was suggested that the extremity of the scale values associated with standards used to represent effective and ineffective performance in Mixed Standard Scales may affect the nature of performance ratings derived from MSS responses and decisions based on MSS ratings. When the extremity of standards was experimentally manipulated, it was found that standard extremity affects both the level of performance ratings and the proportion of logically inconsistent response patterns observed. In addition, standard extremity appears to affect the rankings on performance of ratees. The implications of these observations for the development of Mixed Standard Scales were discussed.     

The Evolution of Counseling and Guidance in Australia: Or,as yet no Counseling Kangaroos?

Cultural similarities between Australia and the United States are explored to determine the extent to which Australia has evolved an indigenous counseling model.