The Graduate Research Achievement Test – GRAT® developed by the American Research Foundation, an independent research organization; is a tool designed to measure students and graduate’s proficiency in Research Principles, Methods, and Practices.
The GRAT® test measures Master students, Graduate Students, PhD Students, Junior Researchers, and Postdoctoral Candidate’s abilities to use and understand research skills.
The American Research Foundation has worked closely with Senior Researchers for a number of years to develop the Research Skills Test which measures the research skills of anyone interested in attending a graduate research program or working in the research field. The test is designed by our research oriented team of 85+ senior researchers working at more than 50 private and governmental, academic and research intuitions in more than 25 countries.
Through its research oriented mission, the American Research Foundation has realized early that research skills are vitally important to students who want to succeed in the graduate research programs. Graduate students and researchers are expected to be productive members of a research team from the start of their careers. With that in mind, the American Research Foundation has looked for a tool which shall serve as a benchmark against which all would be researchers shall be judged. Based on that, the American Research Foundation came up with the idea of designing a certificate program to test graduate students and would-be researcher’s research skills and that is how the GRAT® test saw the light.
The GRAT® test aims at providing students with a proof they can show to potential graduate schools and research institutes that they have an excellent understanding of the research skills needed to undertake efficient research. The certificate is also designed to provide a further example of a person’s commitment to a career in research that can appear on their curriculum vitae, alongside any research project they may have undertaken with a view to pushing themselves above their peers in the race for research oriented career.
The GRAT® test questions have been developed by our Research Certification Board. The purpose of which is to examine the students’ understanding of the skills underlying the research process. GRAT® test measures student’s deep knowledge and understanding of research design and principles and their capacity to address, formulate, and answer basic research questions and understanding of statistical tests/procedures.
The test measures student’s ability to:
- address, formulate, and answer basic research questions including relevant hypotheses;
- understand and be able to analyze data using descriptive statistics (e.g., mean and standard deviation);
- understand and be able to conduct statistical analyses for dealing with parametric and non-parametric date (e.g., chi-squares, simple regression, ANOVA);
- be able to explain the relevance of the assumptions that underpin the above statistical procedures;
- be able to use SPSS for windows to conduct the above analyses and explain the statistical outputs produced by SPSS.
The certificate is also a test of a student’s understanding of research methodology. In order to pass, a student must get a score of 85% or above. Notification of a pass or fail is automatic, and those who pass are sent a printable certificate through email. ARF can also send test results directly to universities, graduate schools, research institutions and other organizations.
