Personality Tests for Graduate Admissions?

Attention grad students! The GRE may not be your biggest worry if you're trying to get into the grad school of your dreams, especially if you're a slacker.

But people applying to grad schools aren't slackers, right?

Right.

For the most part, it's probably accurate to assume that people headed to grad school are motivated, resilient, organized, and have the utmost integrity.

If that's true, however, then why do nearly half of all students who start higher education programs like masters or doctoral degrees drop out? Don't they have the motivation to continue? The chops? The stamina?

That's what ETS is hoping its new standardized test, the Personality Profile Index (PPI), will find out. This new test, with 24 questions, is a tool designed to measure those immeasurable qualities listed above, and since it's given to faculty members who know the students instead of the students themselves, the results should be fairly accurate.

On the test, five faculty members of the evaluated student's choice, are asked to rank the student on a scale of 1-5 for the above character traits and are given the opportunity to explain their answers. The student obviously has no knowledge of the faculty members' responses.

Although the test can't replace the highly-sought-after recommendation letter, it can provide more info so admissions counselors can determine which grad students are up to the task of masters' programs. And maybe, just maybe, attrition rates will go down as a result.

At least, that's the theory. One never knows if it will work, but I guess it's worth a shot – after all, it's free to send the PPI score reports to four grad schools of choice.

And we all know that slackers love getting stuff for free.

Photo © flickr user nonofarahshila