Personality Profiling for Grad Applicants
There’s about to be another GRE score for programs to use when they’re considering which applicants to admit for graduate work. The Educational Testing Service’s “Personal Potential Index” distills “an applicant’s personality … into six traits, and the applicant is rated on each of them by various professors and former supervisors on a scale of 1 to 5.” The five dimensions are knowledge and creativity, communication skills, teamwork, resilience, planning and organization, and ethics and integrity, and there’s also an overall rating. Some additional information is here.
To a considerable degree, this new scoring system simply standardizes what’s already being done by schools themselves on their own application forms, which routinely ask those writing reference letters to rate applicants on various desiderata. Still, it’s interesting to think about how some of the more colorful characters in our discipline would have scored on these dimensions when they were applying for admission, and even whether they’d have gotten admitted in the first place.
Comments
Two thoughts occurred to me reading this…
First, your question is fraught with selection bias. My reaction was how many ‘colorful’ characters who washed out of grad school or Asst Prof positions would have scored; how some who didn’t get into grad school (or the program of their choice) would have scored; what the distribution of dimension scores would be across program rankings; and whether some dimensions are more important at one point in a scholar’s career versus another point.
Second, who’s to say what are appropriate benchmarks for these dimensions, or that the current mix of dimensions in the population of academics is optimal? Given the social dysfunction not uncommon to academia, I’d say there are about 4 dimensions that could be usefully boosted among scholars.
Posted by: Andrew | July 10, 2009 10:22 AM
A standardized personality test as part of the application? Somehow, that really rubs me the wrong way.
Posted by: Adam | July 10, 2009 11:31 AM
The teamwork dimension is particularly interesting, since academic work is known for being among the least “team”-oriented of them all.
(Also, should they be admitting that resilience is required?)
Posted by: Paul Gowder | July 10, 2009 01:49 PM