Inside Higher Ed reports today that the Educational Testing Service, creator of the SAT and GRE, is developing a new joke of an "assessment tool" called the "Personal Potential Index."
This assessment is described as a questionnaire that professors would use to rate their students for graduate school applications. ETS claims that this tool is a "standardized assessment," meaning that it would measure all students in the same way.
This is a joke for a number of reasons. First, students would pick the professors who would rate them, which automatically invalidates the idea that the assessment is standardized. Obviously, students will pick professors who they expect to give them good ratings.
In addition, how many professors really know their students that well these days? Classes are huge, and students rarely interact with their profs one-on-one. There's no way that profs can accurately rate students on the six areas supposedly measured by this assessment: knowledge and creativity, communication skills, team work, resilience, planning and organization, and ethics and integrity.
Let's hope that grad schools do not encourage ETS to continue to develop such an unfair tool.
