Can the “Personal Potential Index” Measure What Standardized Tests Miss?
The Educational Testing Service may soon offer hope to students who dream about attending graduate school but have difficulty performing well on current standardized tests. Ironically, ETS is doing so by introducing another standardized measurement tool, the “Personal Potential Index.” But instead of measuring graduate school candidates solely on cognitive skills or factual knowledge like traditional admissions tests, the Personal Potential Index would gauge a candidate’s non-academic strengths and weaknesses.
Developed at the request of the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) advisory board, which was seeking ways “to measure and evaluate non-cognitive abilities,” the Personal Potential Index aims to give graduate schools a broader perspective on applicants, according to a recent article by Scott Jaschik that appeared in Inside Higher Ed (“New Standard for Getting In,” July 6, 2007).
“The development of the index is a significant acknowledgment of the dissatisfaction with traditional admissions measures,” Jaschik writes.
Personal Potential in 6 Dimensions
Supporters of the index, Jaschik says, hope that it will “create a standardized tool that gives credit to strengths that many students … may have that don’t show up on the GRE.”
Intended as a supplement to traditional admissions measures such as test scores and letters of recommendation, the index would be filled out online by three or four people recommending a student for admission. Professors and supervisors would answer four questions for each of the six non-cognitive areas measured, rating applicants on a five-point scale, from “below average” to “truly exceptional”:
- knowledge and creativity
- communication skills
- teamwork
- resilience
- planning and organization
- ethics and integrity
This evaluation could reveal handicaps in people who, for example, don’t play well with others or who collapse like a deck of cards under pressure. A teamwork question may ask whether the candidate is supportive of others’ work, while a resilience question may ask how well an applicant can overcome setbacks and challenges.
In addition to rated answers, the index also allows a candidate’s reviewers to provide written remarks or elaborations in each of the measured categories and to comment on an applicant’s “overall suitability for the programs to which they are applying.” Schools would receive overall average ratings, as well as average scores for each category, and would have access to evaluators’ complete responses for each candidate.
Standardizing the Intangibles
Although ETS hopes that graduate schools may eventually be able to use the index to hone in on which non-cognitive skills will be predictive of a candidate’s success, some critics question if it makes sense for ETS to attempt “to quantify qualities that relate to character and personality in ways that may be unique to individuals and not suited for numbers.”
Some, like Robert Schaeffer, public education director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, say the index simply goes too far. Schaeffer questions, for example, what a 3.8 rating reveals about a candidate’s resilience or organization. “This is overkill,” he’s quoted as saying, “trying to over-qualify everything to a decimal point.” Schaeffer commends the non-cognitive focus of the index, but wonders “why the questions couldn’t be more open-ended with the idea that admissions committees could read what people write, rather than having a score to quickly consider.”
The ultimate value of the index, which is still in the pilot stages, remains to be seen. But for now, at least, ETS is acknowledging that an individual’s academic and testing abilities can’t be the only measures by which to identify educational success. “I think what’s happening is that the largest manufacturer of standardized tests has seen the writing on the wall,” Schaeffer says in Jaschik’s article, “and that the future [of admissions] is not just in testing.”
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