The US Coast Guard Academy provides a unique setting for predictive research using psychological tests. Not only is it a “closed” setting, but all incoming students (“swabs”) take a battery of tests in the summer before their first semester. Although the senior author and her colleagues had succeeded in isolating variables that differentiate cadets who successfully complete the program from those who drop out, the current study was an attempt to use the profile data to make specific predictions concerning completion vs attrition by use of a discriminant analysis. The relative ineffectiveness of personality scales, even after considerable refinement of the variables, to predict this specific outcome is an indication of the complexity of the decision making.
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