137.
RANT WARNING, but here: This really, to put it crudely, sticks a can in my craw.
For those unable to access the article or unfamiliar with the hoops and vagaries of American collegiate application, it basically says that the Educational Testing Service (ETS) has followed in the steps of role-playing games devised another way to quantify students for the admissions process. This time, it's more intangible stuff--creativity, teamwork, "resilience" (what?), planning, ethics, and other traits--that's being broken down into a familiar "student is in the top 1%/top 5%/etc" grid that admissions offices often see.
I think it's bull.
I take such huge issue with this on a number of levels. First and foremost, the idea that you can take these "soft" traits and quantify them on some level is flimsy. The following idea that you can then take these hashed-out numbers and make them comparable (this so-called idea of "standardized subjectivity") is just flat-out stupid. Perhaps it makes one feel better to say "Look, this applicant has a 3 in creativity and this one got a 4," but it's absolutely meaningless when your 3s and 4s aren't the same. It's cheap.
I also have a tangential misgiving about what this numerical quality means for human characteristics (and their ability to be observed). In saying "this guy is a 5" or "this one, just a 2," one is saying that these traits are not only measurable but are thus consistent and evident. As everyone knows, creativity is a constant output. Teamwork is wholly self-dependent. Ethics are proven until... well, they aren't? The underlying idea that quantifying human variables somehow stabilizes them just blows my mind. Again, it's a feelgood--no admissions officer truly enjoys declining a candidate--but it's meaningless.
This leads me to my next issue, in which I find it functionally useless from another point of view. The quotes of the article somehow think that this system is any more helpful than a letter of recommendation. It isn't. Frankly, I think it's a little insulting. Perhaps the Educational Testing Service wanted to "help" graduate students, but based on what I've said already I don't think it's honestly helping them at all. The "help" will really assist perhaps already inundated admissions offices trying to honestly cobble together the next incoming class. It's definitely much easier to say, "Let's do a creativity cutoff of 4; there are too many apps this year."
However, I argue that if you're worth your salt, you would know that this is a bit of a cop-out. To pull a quote from the article: "If it's a program that requires a lot of creativity, then it's important to have somebody who has a lot of creativity." Pardon me, the heavens have parted. I have only a peripheral understanding of admissions processes, but the officers I've seen and know can cut through BS like a machete and things like interviews and recommendations are old-hat. So, too, are the little check-boxes--they are, after all, impossible to avoid on the Common Application (used by a boatload of unis/colleges as a one-size-fits-all application) for undergraduates--but those are more broad-brush 'red-flag' ordeals. It's also not as if recommendations are being written from a memory partition--both boxes and letters are drawn from the same experience. If a professor or a teacher writes a useful recommendation for better or worse, then he or she tells anything (well, legally anything) that those boxes could say and then some.
With regard to the nebulous praise provided, I believe that it comes with the territory. Letters are "comparatively vague" because it is not the duty of the recommendation to address the student in the pool of X or Y institution; rather, it's meant to address the student. The comparison is the consequent *job* of the officer. This new addition of the Personal Potential Index isn't going to unseat the utility of the recommendation; all it does is give professors and students alike another hoop to jump through.
This isn't to say that Emotional Intelligence, or EI, isn't worthy of emphasis. Creativity, integrity, what have you--these are issues of definite import in the creation of what is essentially a new or additional social network. However, class/yield-building isn't a structure solely based on numbers. Human characteristics aren't essentially quantifiable, nor should their corresponding candidates, as mature and complex adults, be "judged" so simply. Thus, suggesting that the above can be shoehorned into the system in a game of 24 questions is ultimately absurd, meaningless, and, for me, a source of stupid consternation.
For those unable to access the article or unfamiliar with the hoops and vagaries of American collegiate application, it basically says that the Educational Testing Service (ETS) has followed in the steps of role-playing games devised another way to quantify students for the admissions process. This time, it's more intangible stuff--creativity, teamwork, "resilience" (what?), planning, ethics, and other traits--that's being broken down into a familiar "student is in the top 1%/top 5%/etc" grid that admissions offices often see.
I think it's bull.
I take such huge issue with this on a number of levels. First and foremost, the idea that you can take these "soft" traits and quantify them on some level is flimsy. The following idea that you can then take these hashed-out numbers and make them comparable (this so-called idea of "standardized subjectivity") is just flat-out stupid. Perhaps it makes one feel better to say "Look, this applicant has a 3 in creativity and this one got a 4," but it's absolutely meaningless when your 3s and 4s aren't the same. It's cheap.
I also have a tangential misgiving about what this numerical quality means for human characteristics (and their ability to be observed). In saying "this guy is a 5" or "this one, just a 2," one is saying that these traits are not only measurable but are thus consistent and evident. As everyone knows, creativity is a constant output. Teamwork is wholly self-dependent. Ethics are proven until... well, they aren't? The underlying idea that quantifying human variables somehow stabilizes them just blows my mind. Again, it's a feelgood--no admissions officer truly enjoys declining a candidate--but it's meaningless.
This leads me to my next issue, in which I find it functionally useless from another point of view. The quotes of the article somehow think that this system is any more helpful than a letter of recommendation. It isn't. Frankly, I think it's a little insulting. Perhaps the Educational Testing Service wanted to "help" graduate students, but based on what I've said already I don't think it's honestly helping them at all. The "help" will really assist perhaps already inundated admissions offices trying to honestly cobble together the next incoming class. It's definitely much easier to say, "Let's do a creativity cutoff of 4; there are too many apps this year."
However, I argue that if you're worth your salt, you would know that this is a bit of a cop-out. To pull a quote from the article: "If it's a program that requires a lot of creativity, then it's important to have somebody who has a lot of creativity." Pardon me, the heavens have parted. I have only a peripheral understanding of admissions processes, but the officers I've seen and know can cut through BS like a machete and things like interviews and recommendations are old-hat. So, too, are the little check-boxes--they are, after all, impossible to avoid on the Common Application (used by a boatload of unis/colleges as a one-size-fits-all application) for undergraduates--but those are more broad-brush 'red-flag' ordeals. It's also not as if recommendations are being written from a memory partition--both boxes and letters are drawn from the same experience. If a professor or a teacher writes a useful recommendation for better or worse, then he or she tells anything (well, legally anything) that those boxes could say and then some.
With regard to the nebulous praise provided, I believe that it comes with the territory. Letters are "comparatively vague" because it is not the duty of the recommendation to address the student in the pool of X or Y institution; rather, it's meant to address the student. The comparison is the consequent *job* of the officer. This new addition of the Personal Potential Index isn't going to unseat the utility of the recommendation; all it does is give professors and students alike another hoop to jump through.
This isn't to say that Emotional Intelligence, or EI, isn't worthy of emphasis. Creativity, integrity, what have you--these are issues of definite import in the creation of what is essentially a new or additional social network. However, class/yield-building isn't a structure solely based on numbers. Human characteristics aren't essentially quantifiable, nor should their corresponding candidates, as mature and complex adults, be "judged" so simply. Thus, suggesting that the above can be shoehorned into the system in a game of 24 questions is ultimately absurd, meaningless, and, for me, a source of stupid consternation.