Personality Test to Supplement Grad Exams

Prospective students will be ranked on creativity, ethics
By Jason Farago,  Newser Staff
Posted Jul 10, 2009 6:35 AM CDT
Personality Test to Supplement Grad Exams
The Educational Testing Service, which administers the GRE, is supplementing the graduate school admissions exam with a personality survey.   (©{{Brent}})

For students applying to graduate school, good GREs and warm recommendation letters will soon not be enough. The Educational Testing Service has developed an index for professors and supervisors to use to rank students on a 1-to-5 scale for attributes like teamwork, creativity and integrity. The goal of the questionnaire is to raise the percentage of students that finish grad school by measuring a wider range of traits crucial to success, the Washington Post reports,

The Personal Potential Index, introduced this week, is free for students taking the GRE and consists of two dozen questions for faculty. The testing service hopes that admissions offices will use index scores along with test scores to sort for a more diverse class. "As this becomes much more prevalent, and we think this will happen very quickly, faculty will get used to answering these 24 questions very regularly," said a testing official.
(More educational testing stories.)

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