Response to comment on "Typical physics Ph.D. admissions criteria limit access to underrepresented groups but fail to predict doctoral completion"

Casey W Miller; Benjamin M Zwickl; Julie R Posselt; Rachel T Silvestrini; Theodore Hodapp

doi:10.1126/sciadv.aba4647

Response to comment on "Typical physics Ph.D. admissions criteria limit access to underrepresented groups but fail to predict doctoral completion"

Sci Adv. 2020 Jun 5;6(23):eaba4647. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aba4647. eCollection 2020 Jun.

Authors

Casey W Miller¹, Benjamin M Zwickl², Julie R Posselt³, Rachel T Silvestrini⁴, Theodore Hodapp⁵

Affiliations

¹ School of Chemistry and Materials Science, Rochester Institute of Technology, 85 Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester, NY 14623, USA.
² School of Physics and Astronomy, Rochester Institute of Technology, 85 Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester, NY 14623, USA.
³ Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California, 3470 Trousdale Parkway, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA.
⁴ Industrial and Systems Engineering Department, Rochester Institute of Technology, 85 Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester, NY 14623, USA.
⁵ American Physical Society, One Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740, USA.

Abstract

We provide statistical measures and additional analyses showing that our original analyses were sound. We use a generalized linear mixed model to account for program-to-program differences with program as a random effect without stratifying with tier and found the GRE-P (Graduate Record Examination physics test) effect is not different from our previous findings, thereby alleviating concern of collider bias. Variance inflation factors for each variable were low, showing that multicollinearity was not a concern. We show that range restriction is not an issue for GRE-P or GRE-V (GRE verbal), and only a minor issue for GRE-Q (GRE quantitative). Last, we use statistical measures of model quality to show that our published models are better than or equivalent to several alternates.

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