.2 School as Preparation

Schools are in the business of preparing people for careers in the greater world. Therefore they wish to ensure that they only admit
people that they feel they can adequately prepare. Therefore, they have requirements which they use to try and predict how well
students will do in their school.

Unfortunately, conventional predictors are not very accurate. Test scores, like the sat and the GRE, only accurately predict about 40%
of student success. It is the same with letters of recommendation and GPAs , either predict only 40% of the variability as well. Even a
combination of all three only turns out to be 40% effective.

The people who design the admission tests are very aware of the limitations of their art, and do all they can to improve the
predictability, but they haven't gotten it over 40%. It turns out that our standard admission requirements are often ineffective, but there
is little that can be done about it. With few alternatives, schools still insist on the same old reference letters, test scores and GPAs.

When I was dean at UMass, we decided that we didn't want to rely on traditional criteria for graduate and doctoral admissions, so we
scrapped the GPA requirement. Instead, we conducted personal interviews, considered individual backgrounds and accomplishments
and admitted a very different population of graduate students. Our goal was to discover alternative criteria upon which to rely when
admitting students. Unfortunately, we could not. Humans are just too complicated; they contain too many variables to be predicted
according to set criteria. We found lots of students who we chose to admit with non-traditional credentials, but never were able to
categorize new criteria. Each person needs to be evaluated and assessed only by a system complex enough to discern all their faucets
i.e. Another person in an interactive setting.

During the seven years I was Dean, we used our interview system and turned away people with higher GPAs than we were accepting,
simply because we thought the people we interviewed were better candidates.

	No Parrot Question
	Dr. Williams is the dean of the College of Education at the University of Tennesee. He is only allowed to admit a certain number of students to the graduate program there, and he has difficulty choosing from many of the applications that he has received which students would be best for admission. He has narrowed the field for twenty-five available slots, and he has already picked twenty-two students for admission. The three remaining seats are presenting him with problems because he wants to be fair. In order to choose between the three candidates that Dr. Williams has for each of the available seats (9 in all), what opportunities should he present them with in order to earn the seat in the school for the upcoming term?	Answer Here