Attentional control – also called executive functions or cognitive control – refers to our ability to maintain and implement a goal and goal-relevant information in the face of distraction. Previous research has provided limited evidence for a good measurement of attentional control. That is, in addition to low reliability, measures of typical attentional-control tasks have been shown to correlate poorly with one another. This challenges the convergent validity of attentional control, questioning to what extend these tasks assess the same underlying construct. However, assessing the validity of attentional-control tasks requires considering not only convergent validity but also criterion validity (i.e., the extent to which a measure correlates with an outcome variable). The purpose of the present study was to test the criterion validity of typical attentional-control measures. Specifically, we aimed to determine whether the typical attentional-control measures can predict academic achievement in adults. To this end, students were asked to perform several attentional-control tasks (e.g., color Stroop, number Stroop, letter flanker, and Simon tasks, and a task-switching paradigm). The typical measure of each task was then related to students’ university grades. Preliminary results showed reliability estimates ranging from .50 to .72 for most tasks. However, across all tasks, the correlations with the grades were low, ranging from -.10 to .10 (N = 175). These results suggest low criterion validity for typical attentional-control measures. Thus, the criterion validity cannot be used to identify a task that could serve as a starting point for developing better measures of attentional control.