May 22, 2008

GRE to Include a New Component on Skills, Not Just Aptitude

The Educational Testing Service plans to add a measure of skills, like creativity and organization, to the Graduate Record Exam starting in July 2009.

The new component, the “Personal Potential Index,” will allow several individuals to rate students from 1 to 5 in six key areas: knowledge and creativity, communication skills, teamwork, planning and organization, ethics and integrity, and resilience.

David G. Payne, associate vice president for college and graduate programs at ETS, said professors or supervisors chosen by the students would fill out the index. The new component, however, is not meant to replace letters of recommendation, Mr. Payne said. It is intended to measure skills that don’t always come through in letters of recommendation, which often focus on scholarship or only certain skill areas.

Mr. Payne said the index had been designed to allow graduate schools to evaluate students more holistically, especially as they strive to diversify their student bodies. The new component, he said, is a direct response to requests from graduate-school deans and faculties for just such a tool. “They felt this was key to measuring factors that indicate potential success but that don’t necessarily come through on a standardized test,” Mr. Payne said.

The index will be bundled with the GRE, but will be optional unless graduate schools start requiring it. Mr. Payne said he expected the new component to raise the cost of the test from $10 to $15. The test currently costs $140 in the United States, and is taken by about 600,000 people each year. —Elyse Ashburn

Comments

1. Ah, the Inbox Exercise. Twenty years of schoolin’, and they put you on the day shift.

   — marcii    May 22, 04:04 PM    #

2. The index would be of much greater value if it included critical thinking skills. Unfortunately, too many people, especially young people, seem to be unable to distinguish fact from fiction.

   — greenblue    May 22, 04:17 PM    #

3. This strikes me as thoroughly illogical. The only purpose of standardised tests, I was given to understand, was that they provided an “objective” yardstick against which to measure the “subjective” indicia represented by grade-point averages, letters of recommendation, etc. If the Educational Testing Service is now to bundle a subjective indicator within the GRE, it surely contradicts the principle underpinning the “traditional” test.

   — Gustave    May 22, 04:24 PM    #

4. Gustave makes a good point. This is clearly about marketing and not measurement.

   — AMT    May 22, 04:59 PM    #

5. I totally agree with #3 and #4. This is NOT an objective measure and I don’t see how it would add value over a letter of recommendation. It’s clearly just something to make people pay more money! (It can’t cost ETS that much per student to score these things that faculty are actually scoring!)

   — Katherine    May 22, 05:37 PM    #

6. The “ethics and integrity” section should be interesting. Would a gay student at Conservative Christan U score low while the same student might be given high marks at Liberal Agnostic U? What is the measure for “resilience?” An excellent student at a mediocre school might not be challenged or resilient at all…but how would faculty know? A weak student who stumbles at a difficult school might be labeled as a quitter. Even more important is the question of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Will learning disabled students be given extra time to demonstrate “teamwork?”

   — Tony    May 22, 07:32 PM    #

7. Holistic measures are a great thing when considering students for admission. But this attempt to project a highly multidimensional (perhaps even infinite-dimensional) concept, the holistic evaluation of a student, down onto a few more one-dimensional axes like the ones already used by the GRE, is not going to be very productive or useful.

   — Bob M.    May 23, 06:23 AM    #

8. Frankly, maybe the new “in box” drill may be a better “indicator” of student and “future” employee success than the traditional GRE! Maybe???

   — TDC    May 27, 09:37 AM    #

Previous: Secrecy Shields Industry-Financed Tobacco Research at Virginia Commonwealth U.
Next: Senate Passes Bill on Veterans' Tuition Benefits by Veto-Proof Margin