The Integrated Test Scheme For Evaluating University Graduates’ Occupational Psychological Adaptation

There is a grave situation of employment. University administrators eager to know how to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of career guidance.In fact, some professional psychological tests are always used to understand the psychological situation of the students, and to improve the efficiency of employment counseling. Recently, a number of professional psychological tests have been developed at home and abroad, such as self-directed search inventory, career decision self-efficacy scales, work values scales, vocational personality scales. These tests can be used to evaluate and predict people’s career choices and adaptive behaviors. But there are also some questions worth pondering: (a) we have no time to implement all of these very time-consuming tests in career counseling. (b)There are only a few of studies to explore the validity of these tests on the professional psychological adaptation (OPA) of college graduates.In this study, 725 graduates from different universities were surveyed by the composite questionnaire. The purposes of the study is described as follows: analyze the professional psychological status of university graduates; examine the validity of these tests on the OPA of college graduates; construct mathematical models to predict OPA, which will integrate existing occupational tests as a preferred solution, fast and efficiently assess and predict the smooth degree of college graduates’job hunting and the employment quality after getting jobs.The main conclusions of this study are as follows:(1) 59.5% fresh graduates had been employed before they graduated; 78.7% former year’s graduates had been employed. If judging the employment situation only by“had a job or not”, there was no significant difference in employment situations between females and males, urban graduates and rural graduates. But graduates from the key institutions of higher learning could find a job more easily than the graduates from general institutions of higher learning. Further considering the employment quality index, there was no significant difference in employment quality score between females and males, urban graduates and rural graduates, only and non-only children, graduates from the key institutes of higher learning and the graduates from general institutes of higher learning. But the differences in employment quality score between the students majored in liberal arts and science was obvious. Graduates of liberal arts had higher employment quality scores than graduates of science.(2) Some selected scales or subscales had favorable differential validity and predictive validity in evaluating college Graduates’OPA, such as WVS subscales“growth and development "," organizational structure "," fair assessment”; "differentiation" and "consistency" of vocational interests; CDSE; "extraversion, ""neuroticism" subscales of NEO-FFI, JSCS and Subjective Norm scale. The graduates who valued work-focused values, highly differentiated in vocational interests, had higher career decision-making self-efficacy and high emotional stability, were better psychologically adapted. (3) Discriminant analysis model and artificial neural network (ANN) model can be used to assess and predict OPA of the graduates efficiently. It’s feasibility for us to establish the prediction model of OPA. The re-identification and cross-validation accuracy of the discriminant analysis model in distinguishing the maladaptive and well-adapted graduates reached 84%.Using ANN model to predict, the re-identification accuracy was 94.7%, the cross-validation accuracy of verification collection data reached 91.5%.The prediction accuracy of ANN model was higher than the discriminant analysis model. Compared with discriminant analysis model, ANN model was more suitable for assessing OPA of the graduates. Under the premise of high prediction efficiency (80%), the indicators of the ANN models could be further simplified.This study extends the researches on the validity of occupational tests.?Based on the mathematical models, the theoretical assumptions and frameworks of the university graduates’occupational psychological adaptation were formed. The prediction model built in the OPA can help career guidance personnel to evaluate the status of graduates, find the current problems, predict the future situation. Then they can take appropriate measures to help the graduates to achieve higher levels of OPA.