Predictive validity of the special tertiary admission test in Papua New Guinea

The Special Tertiary Admission Test for Papua New Guinea (STAT-P) designed by the Australian Centre for Educational Research (ACER) is jointly administered by ACER, Papua New Guinea University of Technology (PNGUoT), the University of Goroka (UoG) and Pacific Adventist University (PAU) and used to admit students to these universities since 2016. STAT-P is similar to other aptitude tests conducted by ACER for universities in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and Ireland but has been adapted to minimize cultural bias and language issues that may be peculiar to Papua New Guinea (PNG). As an admission tool, STAT-P is required to have a positive relationship with an outcome criterion. This relationship, which is often called the predictive validity of the test has not been studied since the inception of STAT-P. Consequently, the purpose of this study was to establish the predictive validity of STAT-P. A completely randomized design was used to select the 2018 cohort of first year students at PNGUoT as a sample for this study. The specific objective was to estimate the relationship between marks obtained for STAT-P and another subject titled “English Grammar and Composition” (LA101) which was taken by all the first-year students at PNGUoT. The results show that a positive and significant linear relationship (r (475) = 0.363 and P = 0.00) exists between the two subjects. This result supports the rationale for the continued use of STAT-P as a valid tool for admitting students to PNGUoT.