Or, Do PhDs roll Twenties?
Wow. This L.A. Times story — a version of this much better reported year-old piece by Scott Jaschik at InsideHigherEd — describes a colossally bad idea on which ETS (Educational Testing Service) is trying to sell graduate admissions deans.
Put very briefly: ETS has come up with an additional form for graduate school applicants (and paying customers of the GRE) to give to their recommendation-letter writers. The form asks recommenders to rate the applicants on “a scale of 1-5” on their abilities in “knowledge and creativity, communication skills, team work, resilience, planning and organization, and ethics and integrity.” (1) These ratings are then put through some kind of algorithm to produce a “PPI” score (Personal Potential Index), which purports to measure the applicant’s “non-cognitive” qualities. These, in turn, will supposedly enable admissions folks to determine whether or not the applicant is likely to complete graduate school, like, ever. (Only 57% of admitted students actually do, you see).
I won’t get into all the ways that this is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea. But to quickly run down a few objections: don’t most schools already require similar rating forms in their grad applications? how can “knowledge,” “creativity,” or “planning” be non-cognitive? how would a prof. know about a student’s “resilience,” anyway? does ETS have data that backs up the correlation between PPI and grad school success?
(Other arguments against this are left as an exercise for the reader).
Continue reading “Roll for Initiative, Doctorate”
Dael A. Norwood 