In connection with the construction of the Swedish Scholastic Aptitude Test there is extensive follow-up and research work. Each administered test is followed up with regard to possible changes in the group of test participants and in the results of different subgroups of test participants. The results from this follow-up work have been presented in a large number of reports. In addition, the comprehensive database has been used for research in various fields published in scientific journals.
Description of different ways information from the SweSAT database is used in research
Background Variables/Gender
A major research area concerns how background variables such as age, educational level, or gender affect the results of the SweSAT. Wikström and Wikström (2017) investigated how differences between individuals' high school grades and results on the Högskoleprovet are related to background variables such as gender, age, study background, immigrant status, and socioeconomic background. The study showed that the variable that most strongly affects differences between grades and SweSAT results is gender – men generally perform worse than women in high school grades but achieve better results on the SweSAT.
Repeated Testing/Strategies
There is no limit to how many times one is allowed to take the SweSAT, and if there are multiple test results, the best result always applies. This rule has led to several studies on the effects of repeated test participation and who takes advantage of the opportunity of taking the test multiple times. It is a well-known phenomenon that many test participants improve their results from the first to the second time they take the test, but for how many repetitions does this effect last? This has been investigated by following individuals who have taken the test on two or more occasions.
Admission Groups
Several studies have examined how students admitted to higher education on different merits perform during their studies. Dahlin et al. (2012) investigated whether medical students admitted either through academic merits or interviews performed differently when it came to communication with patients. These showed that students admitted based on interviews had a significantly lower risk of exhibiting unsatisfactory communicative ability compared to students admitted through grades or score on the SweSAT. Another study examined the validity of high school grades and the SweSAT as admission instruments and whether these two differ in terms of how predictive they are for success in higher education programs (Cliffordson, 2008). The results showed that the predictive validity of the SweSAT score was weaker than that of high school grades, and that for the SweSAT results, there were large differences in predictive validity between different study programs, while these differences were significantly smaller for high school grades.
Use of Results on Subtests/Tasks from the Test
Some studies use results on specific subtests or collect their own data using tasks that have been used in previous tests. An example of such use is Tinghög et al. (2021), who used data from the READ subtest in a specific test to investigate whether women perform differently than men on a text with content related to economics. The aim was to investigate whether stereotype threat, which means that prejudices about gender and economics negatively affect women's performance on tasks related to economics, could be identified using SweSAT data.
Statistics/Equating
There are a number of studies and report that use advanced statistics to examine the properties of the test.
Strategies
Some studies investigate what strategies test participants use and how the strategies affect the results. Stenlund and colleagues examined in two studies whether different groups – based on gender and performance – used different strategies and whether it is possible to find groups that have different strategies based on how risk-prone, motivated, and anxious they say they are.
Scores/Normalized Scores
Many studies use the results of the SweSAT as a control variable or for comparison. An example of this is studies that examine grade inflation, using the SweSAT results to investigate whether the grades awarded are reasonable in comparison.
Publications, Reports, and External Research
We have gathered a collection of texts written about the SweSAT, both reports produced at the department and scientific articles published in external journals at the Swedish website. To access the Swedish site, look in the top right corner of the page and click "Svensk webbplats".
