| First-Term Mark | Percentage Leaving School in Various Years After Entrance into the High School | ||
| Left During First Year | Left in 2nd, 3rd, or 4th Years, or Failed to Graduate in 4th | Graduated | |
| Below 50% | 61 | 39 | 0 |
| 50 to 59% | 49 | 46 | 5 |
| 60 to 69% | 39 | 58 | 3 |
| 70 to 79% | 20 | 62 | 18 |
| 80 to 89% | 17 | 46 | 37 |
| 90 to 100% | 6 | 40 | 54 |
Thorndike, in referring to the significance of such results, says: "Ten times as many of those marked below 50 leave in the first year as of those marked 90 or above. Of 115 pupils marked below 50 not one remained to graduate in four years. As the marks rise the percentage leaving in the early years steadily falls and the percentage graduating rises. Such prophecies... could easily be worked out for any community. They show that in the important matter of the length of stay in school a pupil's career is far from being a matter of unpredictable fortuity.... It will not be long before [we] will remember with amusement the time when education waited for the expensive tests of actual trial to tell how well a boy or girl would succeed with a given trade, with the work of college and professional school, or with the general task of leading a decent, law-abiding, humane life."
Prompted by Dearborn's study of the relation between work in high school and work in the university, Smith made a somewhat more intensive study of a group of students in the University of Iowa. Dearborn had investigated the academic careers of pupils from eight large and four small high schools in Wisconsin, and concluded that three-fourths of the students entering the university from these high schools would maintain throughout the university approximately the same rank as they had held in high school. When the groups were divided into upper and lower halves, about seventy per cent of those in the upper high school section were found in the upper half of the university section; about the same number of those in the lower high school half were found in the lower university half.
Smith's data showed almost precisely the same figures as those of Dearborn. From the Liberal Arts class of 1910 (one hundred and sixty students) those were chosen whose records were complete in both high school and university. This gave a total of one hundred and twenty students. On the basis of their standing, as based on the grades assigned in all subjects studied, they were ranked in order for each year of high school and university. They were then separated into quintiles on the basis of these rankings, and their standing in these various quintiles observed from year to year.
When the students, on the basis of their general high school average (for the four years), are distributed through their respective quintiles in the university (general average again) the results are as shown in the table on page 183.
TABLE 13
Showing the Relations between High School Records and University Records (Smith). See Text for Explanation
| University Average | |||||
| H. S. Average | 1st Quint. | 2nd Quint. | 3rd Quint. | 4th Quint. | 5th Quint. |
| 1st Quintile | 54% | 17% | 17% | 4% | 8% |
| 2nd Quintile | 25% | 29% | 17% | 13% | 16% |
| 3rd Quintile | 17% | 25% | 20% | 21% | 17% |
| 4th Quintile | 0% | 25% | 25% | 33% | 17% |
| 5th Quintile | 4% | 4% | 21% | 29% | 42% |
In considering this table it is apparent that if the high school students were distributed through the various university quintiles on a purely chance basis, and without any reference to their high school records, there would tend to be twenty per cent of each high school quintile in each of the university quintiles. Any percentage higher than this twenty per cent thus indicates some significant relation between the two sets of grades. On the whole there is a close relation indicated. The tendency is clear for those in a given high school quintile to be found in or near the same quintile in their university work. The relation is particularly close in the highest and lowest quintiles. In the intermediate quintiles there is more or less shifting about.
In the same way it is possible to classify all students in quintiles during their first high school year, and then to trace their careers through the following three years of high school and four years of college. The following tabulation shows the results when this was done. The figures show the percentage of each quintile in first year high school who were found in the same quintile in the various later years.