New Index Will Score Graduate Students' Personality Traits

The Educational Testing Service wanted to help graduate school applicants prove they are more than a set of test scores. So it developed a tool to rate students across a broad sweep of traits -- creativity, teamwork, integrity -- that admission tests don't measure.

The Personal Potential Index, unveiled this week, looks suspiciously like another set of scores. An applicant's personality is distilled into six traits, and the applicant is rated on each of them by various professors and former supervisors on a scale of 1 to 5.

Officials with the nonprofit organization, based in Princeton, N.J., say the index marks the first large-scale attempt to codify the elusive, subjective attributes that make up a successful grad student. The goal is to raise the share of students who finish graduate school. Non-cognitive, or "soft," skills are considered crucial to success in higher education.

"If it's a program that requires a lot of creativity, then it's important to have somebody who has a lot of creativity," said Debra W. Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools in the District.

The index asks professors to log onto a Web site and rate a student on such skills as "Works well in group settings" and "Accepts feedback without getting defensive." The scale is tailored to force tough choices: Is the student in the top 1 percent of "truly exceptional" human beings, in the top 5 percent of outstanding scholars or merely above average?

Responses are converted into numerical scores, then averaged into ratings in knowledge and creativity, communication skills, teamwork, resilience, planning and organization, and ethics and integrity. Each applicant also gets an overall rating.

Paul Karrer, who graduated from American University in May with a master's degree in public policy, said the index sounds like an improvement over the tradition of collecting letters from professors.

"Most of those recommendation letters are a couple of paragraphs long, and they tend to be comparatively vague," Karrer said. He praised the index as a feat of "standardized subjectivity."

In theory, a graduate admissions office could sort applicants by scores on the index, just as they might screen students now according to scores on the Graduate Record Examination, the battery of entrance tests administered by the testing service.

"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 David Payne, chief operating officer for college and graduate programs at the testing service.

Payne said the index, free for those taking the GRE, gives admissions officers another source of quantitative data on applicants to complement test scores and grades. It was developed partly, ETS said, to help graduate schools identify talented applicants they might have otherwise missed, yielding a more diverse class.