The relationship between the students performance at physics tests they take at private school and their performance at those they do in the univercity enterance examination.

SUMMARY The objective of this work is to analyze a possible relationship between the students? performance at physics tests they attend at private schools (dershane) and at OSS, the university placement test taken once a year in Turkey. The survey was applied on 396 students who took specified tests in a private school in Ankara. Relevant data was retrieved from 6 OSS model tests and the real OSS placement test. 3 model tests were taken in the first semester and the second 3 were taken in the second semester. The difficulty and reliability of model tests were assumed to be equal to those of OSS. A general profile of students was based upon the very first model test, which was later analyzed vis-à-vis other model tests, average score, and OSS in order to see the significance level of the relevance between different scores. The same analysis was applied to discover any similar relationship between all model tests and OSS. The data was processed in SPSS program (Statistical Package for Social Science). The relevant t test was applied in examining hypotheses. The results were evaluated at a 0,05 significance level. Statistical analyses revealed that students enrolled in private schools achieved higher scores in physics, and that the performances at model tests and OSS are closely related.