Although academic ability is the most important explanatory variable in studies of student learning, researchers control for it with a wide array and combinations of proxies. The authors investigated how the proxy choice affects estimates of undergraduate student learning by testing over 150...

Individual semester-by-semester undergraduate grade point average for each of the eight semesters of the collegiate academic life cycle for five entire student cohorts for the classes of 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002 at a large, private university in the northeast (N = 12,663) reveal a...