Colleges Want Students with Character, But Can’t Measure It

Colleges Want Students with Character, But Can’t Measure It
nautil.us

In terms of measurements of character, has there been much thought given to looking at longitudinal data of a student's career? An easy one would be improvement on standardized tests over time. I qualified for the National Merit Award because I happened to be doing prep work for SATs...I didn't even know the PSATs meant anything, but just because I performed well on one test, I was the beneficiary of all those schools who use "Number of National Merit Scholars in freshman class" as some kind of quality metric...My SAT performance afterward was only middling-good. I don't think that should've put me in a higher bracket than someone who struggled at first, but rather than giving up, did what it took to reach a higher percentile.

But what about students who go from being a flop, say, in their sophomore year, to really growing in terms of performance and accomplishments by their senior years? A student who, over 4 years, has a C average, but by senior year, is acing AP classes...that takes a considerable amount of grit. And the student is on the upswing. Hell, even a student who did no sports until senior year, but manages to letter on a high-performing team in a sport new to him/her...that to me is about as outstanding as a state champion who competed since the age of 5.

> The flaws in standardized testing are well-documented at this point.... their predictive powers only forecast a student’s progress as far as the first semester of their freshman year.

Let's be honest. Raise your hand if you needed markedly more than your first semester of freshman year to figure out which of your friends at college were going to cut it in some traditional academic sense.

Not saying that's the only sense, but as far as the college should be able to measure, academics for 4(+) years are the only fair initial barometer. Of course, academics can't say anything about who can write a 7+ figure donation to the college 30 years after graduation...

Humans are irrational by default (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDAzsZLvfPw). This is more or less proven in many behavioral experiments (Too lazy right now to source them) when people will do the obviously wrong thing based on internal logics.

Because of this, we can look to the irrational beliefs of people that influence the schools. Namely, social and physical proof. And the social proof has a major benefit: it's less likely that someone is bullshiting credentials if they have an actual degree to back it. http://xkcd.com/451/

Still, it will be a while before irrational opinions catch up (or are leapfrogged by locations like Ghana that embrace the new medium) and that there are ways to catch cheaters.