Higher education admission is under fire. It is widely portrayed as a frenzied process that encourages an outsized focus on standardized test scores and a pressure on aspiring students to take AP classes and pad their resumes. Reports link this competitive environment to record-high levels of stress and depression in young people. Critics also point out the unfair advantage the process gives to families of greater economic means.Along with these reports is an emerging recognition about the power of the admission process: How educational institutions assess students can shape what students consider to be important. In the May 2017 Independent Ideas blog post “How an Entrenched College Admission System Is Evolving to Consider Character,” David Holmes, co-founder and co-director of the Institute on Character and Admission and a former school and college administrator, calls this phenomenon education’s self-fulfilling prophecy. “What colleges ask for affects how young people develop and who they become at the end of the process,” he says. In an alarming example of how achievement pressure can impact values, a recent Harvard Graduate School of Education survey of 10,000 U.S. middle and high schoolers revealed that 80 percent chose high achievement or happiness as their top priority, while only 20 percent picked caring for others. The independent school community has not been immune to this criticism, and is often subject to an amplified outcry, as it affects a younger subset of children that many parents feel are underserved by traditional standardized testing.
The Character Imperative
Recognizing this influence and acknowledging that the admission process isn’t serving students well, many colleges and universities have begun to work to reshape it. The “test-optional” movement, which de-emphasizes standardized tests in college admission, began in the 1980s and has now been adopted by more than 950 schools. When test scores are de-emphasized, character skills play a more important role in admission decisions. In 2011, a meeting of nearly 200 college leaders at the University of Southern California (USC) resulted in the report A Case for Change in College Admissions. As Alia Wong writes in The Atlantic, this meeting confirmed the “consensus that the [college admission] system is in desperate need of reform. The intense competition it fuels undermines students’ well-being; pressures applicants to fine-tune their test-taking skills and inflate their resumes; and distorts the purpose of higher education.” While standardized testing continues to be an important common measure of ability in an unstandardized educational environment, new measures of character provide additional nuance and depth to a student’s profile and greatly enhance the ability of admission professionals to predict a student’s ability to grow and thrive in their school’s community.A more recent report, Turning the Tide: Inspiring Concern for Others and the Common Good through College Admissions (2016), produced by the Making Caring Common Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, focuses more specifically on building character via the admission process. This report, endorsed and contributed to by a broad consortium of leaders in higher education, states as its goals, “to reshape the college admissions process and promote greater ethical engagement among aspiring students, reduce excessive achievement pressure, and level the playing field for economically disadvantaged students.” Wong writes, “Whereas the USC report focused mainly on de-emphasizing test scores and admissions selectivity and treating admission into a selective school as ‘beginning of an educational journey,’ this one aims to fundamentally alter students’ reasons for getting into college.”
The work of the Institute on Character and Admission, which includes leaders at the collegiate and secondary levels, researchers and innovators, and testing organizations, broadens the conversation to include secondary schools with its aim “to change admissions practice at the higher and secondary education levels to reflect the significance of character strengths in attaining success in school, college, and work.” Independent schools have long led the way in addressing character. Development is an important part of most schools’ missions. Many of our educators have deeply embraced researcher Carol Dweck’s theory of “growth mindset,” which ties success in all aspects of life to traits like grit and perseverance, and emphasizes their ability to grow and change. The work of Tony Wagner, who advocates for widespread change in education in order to develop innovative individuals who will succeed in the 21st century, is also influential in our schools.
This focus on character in independent schools has been refueled by recent compelling evidence of the link between character and success in life. In another recent Independent Ideas blog post “With Character Emphasis, Independent Schools Return to Roots and Blaze Trails,” Holmes writes, “Today, researchers such as Nobel prize-winning economist James Heckman, Nathan Kuncel at the University of Minnesota, Angela Duckworth at the University of Pennsylvania, and others have affirmed that GPA and college persistence are correlated strongly with character traits, including self-control and perseverance. Moreover, research shows that character strengths are a stronger predictor of success in college, work, and life than conventional measures, including SAT scores.”
Assessment Tools
In 2009, the Elementary Schools Research Collaborative (part of the larger Independent School Data Exchange, INDEX) sought to find a way to measure character education in a more systematic way. In partnership with the Educational Testing Service (ETS), it developed a tool called the Mission Skills Assessment (MSA). The MSA measures the degree to which schools are living up to their missions to help students develop six important character skills: creativity, curiosity, ethics, resilience, time management, and teamwork. This tool, which has evolved over time, is now operated by The Enrollment Management Association (EMA). The MSA has been administered more then 100,000 times to students from more than 100 schools in the U.S., Canada, Oman, and Australia. In addition to students rating themselves on the six character skills, teachers also provide a rating of the student, providing schools with another lens to interpret change. Schools administer the MSA once per year in the fall to their current 6th-, 7th-, and 8th-grade students, thus also providing a longitudinal component to the assessment. Results are reported at the group level and provide schools with helpful information to incorporate high-leverage practices to build and develop these skills.EMA has spent the last five years exploring the assessment of character for admission. In 2012, we established the Think Tank on the Future of Assessment to create a conversation about 21st century admission and the needs of enrollment managers during their selection process. Members of this committee delved into such questions as, “How do we better understand our students’ many kinds of minds, and look for new ways standardized testing can reveal more about them? How should we support the professionalism and consistency of the admission process and consider carefully what will serve independent schools 10–20 years from now so we can better lead the profession forward? How do we pull together the best available thinking on broadening admission assessments and share that thinking widely? How might we test for important character attributes in the admission process?”
A thorough review of the current research and interviews with numerous experts in the field of noncognitive assessment, the think tank produced two seminal reports and was instrumental in the creation of EMA’s new character-assessment tool for admission, the Character Skills Snapshot, which was developed in partnership with testing experts at ETS and more than 50 independent school enrollment leaders. The Character Skills Snapshot, an online noncognitive assessment tool that schools can opt to use to complement standard cognitive tests such as the SSAT as part of their overall admission process, was rolled out in 2017, following a pilot period of testing with more than 12,000 children and rigorous validity analysis.
The Snapshot measures character skill development at a single point in time, providing admission offices with a clear view of how a prospective student sees himself or herself, as well as those areas in which a school’s pedagogy can assist in the evolution of a child’s emerging skills and build on current strengths. It uses “forced-choice” and “situational judgment” questions to measure applicants’ perceptions and use of eight character skills: integrity, intellectual curiosity, open-mindedness, resilience, responsibility, self-control, social awareness, and teamwork. Measuring these attributes at the time of enrollment not only helps a school better understand a student, it also signals a clear message that character education is important at independent schools.
Given the interconnected goals of higher education and college-preparatory independent schools, efforts in both realms to make the admission process more meaningful—including deepening the focus on character skills—will be mutually reinforcing. Ultimately, these efforts will benefit the well-being and educational
experience of all students.
Read More
The three-part Independent Ideas blog series, “How Character Counts” by David Holmes:https://www.nais.org/learn/independent-ideas/april-2017/with-character-emphasis,-independent-schools-retur/
https://www.nais.org/learn/independent-ideas/may-2017/how-an-entrenched-college-admission-system-is-evolving-to-consider-character/
https://www.nais.org/learn/independent-ideas/june-2017/bringing-educators-together-to-embed-character-in-admission-practice/
Alia Wong’s March 2016 article, “Where College Admissions Went Wrong,” part of The Atlantic’s three-part series examining elite college admissions.
On the Future of Assessment, a 2014 Enrollment Management Association Think Tank report, and “Developing the Character Skills Snapshot,” an article in the Fall 2017 issue of The Yield magazine.
“The Role of Noncognitive Assessment in Admissions,” by Heather Hoerle, in the Winter 2014 issue of Independent School.
The 2016 report, Turning the Tide: Inspiring Concern for Others and the Common Good through College Admissions, from the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Making Caring Common Project.
The Institute on Character and Admission website: character-admission.org