I just wish that grad programs would follow the evidence and not base admissions decisions on personal statements at all - because we have good meta-analytic data showing that they are not predictive of success and because we can't even know who wrote them.

I struggle to think of a statistical "method" that has been more damaging to psychology (and related disciplines) than mediation analysis based on observational data. IMHO all such manuscripts should be desk rejected.

And, of course, such a model would have even worse fit.

Perhaps I am not following correctly but the authors seem to show that a model with two higher-order factors does not fit data very well and then rely on a model with a single higher-order factor for most other analyses without ever showing (or even testing) that this model exhibits adequate fit.

The only systematic review that I know of has also demonstrated that personal statements offer no incremental validity in the prediction of success indicators in grad school.
proquest.com/docview/225605798?pq-origsite=gscholarcbl=1059mod=article_inline&fromopenview=true

Horrifying. Of course, many psychologists simple "forget" to even include a control group. In one notable instance that led to about 100 million viewers being misled about the efficacy of power posing.

Hard to tell without means, standard deviations, and correlations among variables. Pretty surprising that none of that is reported anywhere.

Interesting, although I do so wish that they did not rely on a difference score to operationalize racism in study 1. I also wonder how much of their finding is simply regression to the mean (low racism and good mental health at baseline regressing to higher racism and poorer mental health later).

That's like breaking spaghetti in half.

If there is a club for people like us I want to be a member. I promise to limit all meetings to five minutes and everyone gets to tell someone to STFU once a year.

Lovely. My dad was the same and he never had a father growing up, but somehow he knew to give us that absolute certainty in our childhood.

Agreed but I'd also note that for many of us none of it really matters anymore. Higher ed is just broken. I can get stellar reviews on all my performance dimensions every year and still see my inflation-adjusted salary decline almost every year. I earn less now than when I started out 20 years ago.

d= -.5 when you draw your sample from the population of 5-year old boys.

Depends a bit on your sample characteristics but I'll guess d=2 just because some of those questions don't really capture "desirability" very well.