Robert Tomsho, Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2009
For years, colleges have asked applicants for their grade-point averages and standardized test scores.
Now, schools like Boston College, DePaul University and Tufts University also want to measure prospective students’ personalities.
Using recently developed evaluation systems, these schools and others are aiming to quantify so-called noncognitive traits such as leadership, resilience and creativity. Colleges say such assessments are boosting the admissions chances for some students who might not have qualified based solely on grades and traditional test scores. The noncognitive assessments also are being used to screen out students believed to be at a higher risk of dropping out, and to identify newly admitted students who might need extra tutoring.
Big nonprofits that administer standardized admissions tests, including the College Board, the Educational Testing Service and ACT Inc., are also getting in on the trend. ETS, for instance, which administers the Graduate Record Examination, or GRE, recently unveiled a “personal potential index” designed for schools that want to replace traditional letters of recommendation for prospective grad students with a standardized rating.
“There is quite a bit of demand for these [noncognitive] instruments,” says David Hawkins, director of public policy for the National Association of College Admissions Counseling. Educators say the use of such assessments is likely to grow as some schools search for new tools to recruit more minority and low-income students. At the same time, budget pressures are forcing public institutions in states like California and Florida to find new tools for selecting incoming students.
{snip} Some legal advocates also say the assessments could stir affirmative-action controversy if they are used solely to give a boost to minorities’ admissions chances.
Many colleges have asked personality-related questions for years as part of the admissions process, but the results were seldom scored in a standardized, numerical way, says William Sedlacek, a retired University of Maryland education professor whose “noncognitive questionnaire” has been used by various colleges and by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to award scholarships. He says such assessments are reliable and that if students and counselors figure out how to manipulate them they will have to be revised. “Right now, these things are useful,” Dr. Sedlacek says.
Boston’s Torch Scholars
Boston’s Northeastern University uses noncognitive assessment for its Torch Scholars Program, which is designed to identify applicants who show leadership potential or have overcome adversity but probably wouldn’t qualify for the university based solely on their high-school grades and test scores.
{snip}
Simona Vareikaite, 20, a Northeastern junior majoring in criminal justice, said her high-school grades were good but she didn’t do well on the SAT. Although she found her college’s personality assessment to be “weird,” it gave her a boost in the competition for the Torch scholarship. “The whole process kind of opened a new opportunity for me,” says Ms. Vareikaite, who after immigrating from Lithuania started cleaning offices as an 11-year-old to help support her family.
{snip}
At Oregon State University, every would-be undergraduate must now provide 100-word answers to six questions that are part of what the school calls its “Insight Resume.” One question, designed to measure applicants’ capacity to deal with adversity, asks them to describe the most significant challenge they have faced and the steps they took to address it. Another asks them to describe their experiences facing or witnessing discrimination and how they responded. Every answer is reviewed by two admissions officers and scored on a 1-to-3-point scale.
Michele Sandlin, OSU’s admissions director, says the university implemented the assessment in 2004 in part to help it attract and keep minority, low-income and other applicants who don’t quite have the grades and test scores OSU generally looks for. Low scores on the Insight Resume aren’t used to disqualify students with adequate grades and test scores, she says.
{snip}
The “personal potential index” recently unveiled by ETS has been piloted over the past three years in an Arizona State University effort to get more minority students to take the GRE and attend graduate school. {snip}
And the College Board, which administers the SAT, is working with researchers at Michigan State University to develop a questionnaire designed to measure applicants’ judgment and behavior by asking them how they would respond to various situations, such as a group research project where one student doesn’t contribute. {snip}
Gaming the System
Not everyone thinks such assessments are a good idea. Relying on applicants’ writing about themselves won’t always result in reliable information, says Howard Gardner, a Harvard education professor and author who has studied human intelligence.{snip}
And legal-advocacy groups that have fought racial preferences in college admissions say the new assessment systems could face court challenges if white and minority students are measured differently. “They can’t apply them in a discriminatory fashion or adopt them solely for the purpose of increasing minorities in their classes,” says Michael Rosman, general counsel for the Center for Individual Rights. The group represented plaintiffs before the Supreme Court, which in a pair of 2003 decisions upheld the use of minority status to boost the chances of an applicant in college admissions decisions, but ruled against points-based admissions formulas and said applicants should be considered case-by-case.
Original article
(Posted on August 21, 2009)
Comments
The doctor who operates on you may do a poor job, but at least he will have a good personality.
College and Wildwood New Jersey are similar in that it takes going there to make you realize you needn`t have bothered…
You know where this is going, soon only blacks and minorities will be accepted in universities.
Your children will serve their black masters.
Wouldn’t slaughtering a chicken and reading it entrails be a more Afro-centric way to avoid using ability as a criterium for college entrance? The value and import of college degrees can’t be debased much more.
Actually, blacks will not do well on personality based tests. They have little or no knowledge of civilization in a normal concept. Asians likewise will do poorly. I think the tests are just fine, in addition to SATS, grades, and extracurricular activities.
This is a great idea. I hope that they also start selecting athletes, surgeons, and airline pilots based on “personality” instead of the now discredited traits of athletic ability, medical knowledge, and ability to fly airplanes.
For me and my family, when we fly or have medical operations, we want pilots or surgeons who can tell jokes and make funny faces.
Low scores on the Insight Resume aren’t used to disqualify students with adequate grades and test scores, she says.
Of course they are. If someone is getting in based on their Insight Resume score then someone else is getting bumped. There’s no way around it. I wonder why she felt the need to LIE?
“Using recently developed evaluation systems, these schools and others are aiming to quantify so-called noncognitive traits such as leadership, resilience and creativity.”
Translation:
Boston College Admissions Officer:
“Tawana and Jose, you’ve just been accepted to our university. True, there were hundreds of white applicants with better grades than yours, but after talking with you for five minutes I can tell that you have more personality than they do.
Yeah, that’s the ticket. Personality.”
“Using recently developed evaluation systems, these schools and others are aiming to quantify so-called noncognitive traits such as leadership, resilience and creativity.”
I would be all for it if they actually performed the tests objectively and fairly (which we all know will never happen in a zillion years).
Leadership? Just compare say the governments of Scandinavia to Africa or the despotisms of the Muslim world, hmm.. I wonder which people tend to make the best leaders?
Creativity? Who produces the great works of art?? Who produces great operas and symphonies? Or does “creativity” only count if it relates to things like the possession of mad free stylin’ skillz and the ability to produce phat beats?
Resilience? Ok fine, I have no idea they mean there. Guess that’s the point huh? They just allow in people of the right racial group and write down “Resilient” or “overcomer of adversity” on their application and wave them to the accepted pile above the scores of whites and asians with vastly superior grades and SAT scores and they are totally covered in any potential litigation since things like “resilience” are completely unquantifiable and impervious to any kind of objective measurement?
Just automatically admit anyone who writes “growing up black in America” as their biggest accomplishment in life and totally ignore their lack of any kind of scholastic achievement? Thats WAAAY more fair then culturally biased standardized tests and grades as a means of measurement!
And legal-advocacy groups that have fought racial preferences in college admissions say the new assessment systems could face court challenges if white and minority students are measured differently. “They can’t apply them in a discriminatory fashion or adopt them solely for the purpose of increasing minorities in their classes,”
They can’t but they will. It will likely take a few years for someone to raise an objection and a few more years for it to make it through the courts. Enough time to push through a good number of unqualified college graduates.
This is OK, US whites should just start going to international schools. There are many schools that will take students, and the demand along with the supply is increasing. I went to a major private left wing school in the US and I am now persuing another degree at an international school and the education is just as good.
I can’t imagine why sane people contribute to these mental cemeteries.
Many institutions are cutting costs right now, but I don’t think there’s a list available right now, as there are with states, but I think it’s safe to say that this time next year all these PC dregs will be cutting their budgets to the bone.
If they all had to close, we wouldn’t have so many people entering the working population programmed and prejudiced with the lies of political correctness, so we wouldn’t have to worry about trying to straighten out what amounts to programmed cult members.
A number of years ago a black columnist (I forget the name) wrote that affirmative action admissions to University actually hurt blacks. His reasoning: by putting blacks in schools where they were sure to fail the steriotype of black incompetance was reinforced. If they went to a school they were actually qualified for (say a community college) and did well the next generation might do even better. There is alot of logic to that.
I think that before long we will be giving students grades based upon their personalities too. It makes about as much sense! We all know this is a gimmick to let minority students with poor grades take the place of better performing oriental and caucasian students. I guess we should all get ahold of “sample personality tests” so that we help prep our children for these exams.
This makes virtually no sense. It is a smokescreen to admit low-performing blacks to educational institutions. What’s worse - everyone knows it doesn’t matter what type of personality the black applicant has - the school will just use that as the excuse for admission. Ironically, most blacks are loud, obnoxious, ill-informed, unable to think beyond the superficial, and ultimately boring. Most have no personality so in reality - they should not be admitted based on “personality” either.
“One question, designed to measure applicants’ capacity to deal with adversity, asks them to describe the most significant challenge they have faced and the steps they took to address it. Another asks them to describe their experiences facing or witnessing discrimination and how they responded. Every answer is reviewed by two admissions officers and scored on a 1-to-3-point scale.”
The “better” schools can use similar testing principles to identify and eliminate white applicants with blue-collar cultural backgrounds. They can design a test to look for “respect for authority”, “respect for law”, etc. which they will associate with “authoritarian personality”. The student then can be rejected on the basis of the test results, not on what he/she put on the application form as “father’s occupation”.
They can also ask “culture” questions, like, asking applicants to write their responses to quotes from Cultural Marxists, deconstructivists, etc., to keep out students with aversion to same (or inability to understand said drivel), on the grounds that the school’s graduates are expected to have a minimum level of sophistication and that those failing the test questions won’t cut it.
They can probably design questions to determine who is likely to be culturally working-class Catholic without asking obvious religious questions, and so create a tool for anti-Catholic discrimination.
Colleges will do anything to admit minorities, and give them free tuition, while courting Whites for their money, which then goes to pay for the free tuition for non-Whites.
The key word, obscured by everything else, is “resilience”. This is code for letting in blacks and Hispanics because they inherently must be “resilient” to overcome the horrific oppression in a white-dominated nation.
Or so the liberal thinking goes.
“They can also ask “culture” questions, like, asking applicants to write their responses to quotes from Cultural Marxists, deconstructivists, etc., to keep out students with aversion to same (or inability to understand said drivel), on the grounds that the school’s graduates are expected to have a minimum level of sophistication and that those failing the test questions won’t cut it.”
There’s a book called “The Diversity Myth”
http://tinyurl.com/yvz92j
One of the writers describes how he was in a class with a, let’s say marxist-constructionist. He very quickly learned that to get good grades, all he had to do was write what he knew the teacher wanted to read.
Once word gets around to whites what opinions they’re expected to hold, they will adjust their writing, not necessarily their beliefs.
Something like this could be done effectively only by due
I saw the warning on the 100 word psycho-test. Remember you know is two words.I would never have been admitted to any school without prison guards if I took such tests. When I took a voluntary MMPI, the proctor excused himself and came back in wearing a pistol. He said that I had the highest score ever in the category respect for authority. He said that I had none at all that was possible of recording.I tipped him a c-note. Here is how these tests will be graded. A for African Americans,B for boys who like boys,C for caucasions, D for da cops and da snitches. 20 years from now, you will be reading a prescription from your doctor. It will read two every four hours, you know.
Many years ago I took a simple test, graded by computer, at a street fair. All I did was place eight colors in order of preference, and the computer printed out a shockingly accurate personality assessment. Many decades of standard personality inventories have given the shrinks a huge data base from which to extract statistical probabilities. Don’t even think of naming your daughter Shamika so she’ll slip by the racial bean counters, these tests will identify race as well as a DNA test. Kids will be easily sorted according to their aptitude for intellectual slavery, with the most slavish getting the PhDs. All independent thinkers will be sent to trade schools.
There’s nothing left looney per se in enhancing prediction by
They had to come up with this personality test because minority applicants don’t have the computer skills to google and print out the “Poor, poor, pitiful me” essays universities use in place of test scores and grades to flood their schools with unqualified non whites.
So in the near future, such a comment from a counselor as “he be fly” will guarantee admission?
If we’re talking averages, there’s a lot of stuff Asians can do that are beyond me; there’s also a lot of stuff beyond Blacks. So what do we do - let’s demand diversity in the NBA!
I just dropped my middle daughter off at PC ground zero, UC Berkeley—some say the tenants of the culture wars and the foundation for the destruction of Western Civilization were started right there by the spoiled, privileged children of the WW II generation who believed their communist ideals represented a general will among the larger population. They couldn’t have been more wrong.
New students were busy moving in so I walked around the dorm areas, ‘hang out’ areas and up and down the entire campus. I wanted to see if I could guestimate the number of blacks that were accepted and enrolled. I saw exactly two in my travels, I noted none in my daughter’s cell bloc—I mean dorm. (She chastised me for referring to her dorm as a Soviet-style housing bloc. This is Berkeley, after all). There is a black-only ‘themed’ dorm so perhaps they were all confined there.
The Soviet bosses at Berkeley must be apoplectic that at least half the student body is not made up of blacks, especially considering that a large black ghetto is very close to the campus. Therefore, the universities must twist themselves into knots finding (and justifying) ever more ridiculous reasons to admit unqualified NAMs.
Charles Murray writes in Real Education:
“…The College Board researchers defined college readiness as an SAT score that predicts a 65 percent probability or higher of getting a first-year college grade point average of 2.7 or higher—a B- in an age of grade inflation. The benchmark scores were 590 for the SAT-Verbal, 610 for the SAT-Math, and 1180 or above for the combined scores…”
What we NEVER hear about is how those with SAT scores lower than 1180 fare once they are admitted into a college or university. How often do they switch majors to black or chicano studies or the social sciences (I’m sure in anger and frustration, blaming Whites) once they realize there is no way they can compete with Asians and Whites with Verbal and Math scores in the upper 700s? What is their drop out rate?
Prove to us that admitting unqualified NAMs because of their personality, resilience, creativity, leadership qualities, or overcoming adversity (I assume this means triumphing over White racism) makes them qualified to compete with Whites and Asians with far, FAR higher test scores, higher achievement levels, better study habits, willingness to work harder along with a MUCH higher g-load.
How does personality make up for a lack of vocabulary, low reading level and an inability to compute past a rudimentary level? NAM anger is justified when they quickly realize they are outmatched and have no hope of success—only the anger needs to be directed at those who admit them in the first place and those who tell them they can ‘be anything they want to be’, and not blame White racism for their failures.
Bon
