Employers say they don't trust GPA's - and with good reason considering the curves and grade deflation/inflation across campuses - so almost 200 colleges are going to give CLA+ tests, hoping employers better measure the potential of students.
This is going to get interesting...
Next spring, seniors at about 200 U.S. colleges will take a new test that could prove more important to their future than final exams: an SAT-like assessment that aims to cut through grade-point averages and judge students' real value to employers.The test, called the Collegiate Learning Assessment, "provides an objective, benchmarked report card for critical thinking skills," said David Pate, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at St. John Fisher College, a small liberal-arts school near Rochester, N.Y. "The students will be able to use it to go out and market themselves."
The test is part of a movement to find new ways to assess the skills of graduates. Employers say grades can be misleading and that they have grown skeptical of college credentials.
David Pate, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at St. John Fisher College outside Rochester, N.Y. The college will offer the new CLA + test.
"For too long, colleges and universities have said to the American public, to students and their parents, 'Trust us, we're professional. If we say that you're learning and we give you a diploma it means you're prepared,' " said Michael Poliakoff, vice president of policy for the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. "But that's not true."
The new voluntary test, which the nonprofit behind it calls CLA +, represents the latest threat to the fraying monopoly that traditional four-year colleges have enjoyed in defining what it means to be well educated.
Even as students spend more on tuition—and take on increasing debt to pay for it—they are earning diplomas whose value is harder to calculate. Studies show that grade-point averages, or GPAs, have been rising steadily for decades, but employers feel many new graduates aren't prepared for the workforce.
Meanwhile, more students are taking inexpensive classes such as Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, but have no way to earn a meaningful academic credential from them.
HNTB Corp., a national architectural firm with 3,600 employees, see value in new tools such as the CLA +, said Michael Sweeney, a senior vice president. Even students with top grades from good schools may not "be able to write well or make an argument," he said. "I think at some point everybody has been fooled by good grades or a good resume."
The new test "has the potential to be a very powerful tool for employers," said Ronald Gidwitz, a board member of the Council for Aid to Education, the group behind the test, and a retired chief executive of Helene Curtis, a Chicago-based hair-care company that was bought by Unilever in 1996.
Only one in four employers think that two- and four-year colleges are doing a good job preparing students for the global economy, according to a 2010 survey conducted for the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
Meanwhile, GPAs have been on the rise. A 2012 study looking at the grades of 1.5 million students from 200 four-year U.S. colleges and universities found that the percentage of A's given by teachers nearly tripled between 1940 and 2008. A college diploma is now more a mark "of social class than an indicator of academic accomplishment," said Stuart Rojstaczer, a former Duke University geophysics professor and co-author of the study.
Employers such as General Mills Inc. and Procter & Gamble Co. long have used their own job-applicant assessments. At some companies such as Google Inc., GPAs carry less weight than they once did because they have been shown to have little correlation with job success, said a Google spokeswoman.
At Teach for America, which recruits college students to teach in rural and urban school districts, the GPA is one of just dozens of things used to winnow nearly 60,000 applicants for 5,900 positions. Candidates who make it to the second step of the process are given an in-house exam that assesses higher-order thinking, said Sean Waldheim, vice president of admissions at the group. "We've found that our own problem-solving activities work best to measure the skills we're looking for," he said.
The Council for Aid to Education, the CLA + test's creator, is a New York-based nonprofit that once was part of Rand Corp. The 90-minute exam is based on a test that has been used by 700 schools to grade themselves and improve how well their students are learning.
The CLA + will be open to anyone—whether they are graduating from a four-year university or have taken just a series of MOOCs—and students will be allowed to show their scores to prospective employees. The test costs $35, but most schools are picking up the fee. Among schools that will use CLA + are the University of Texas system, Flagler College in Florida and Marshall University in West Virginia.
The CLA + is scored on the 1600-point scale once used by the SAT "because everyone is familiar with that," said Chris Jackson, director of partner development at the Council for Aid to Education. Instead of measuring subject-area knowledge, it assesses things like critical thinking, analytical reasoning, document literacy, writing and communication.
Cory LaDuke, a 21-year-old senior at St. John Fisher, said he had mixed feelings about taking the CLA + but understood why employers might be skeptical of some graduates because "some people don't work that hard and fake their way through it," he said.
"It kind of sucks that an employer can't trust your GPA, but that's the way it is right now, so this also an opportunity," said Mr. LaDuke. "It's another way to prove yourself."
Other groups also have been seeking ways to better judge graduates' skills. The Lumina Foundation, which aims to boost the number of college graduates, is offering a way to standardize what students should know once they earn a degree. The MacArthur Foundation has helped fund a system of "badges" for online learning to show mastery of certain skills. Last Thursday, President Barack Obama said he wants the federal government to devise a ratings system to gauge colleges' performance based on student outcomes.
Meanwhile, established testing companies are introducing new tools. Earlier this year, Educational Testing Service, which developed the Graduate Record Exam, announced two certificates to reward high marks on its Proficiency Profile, which assesses critical thinking, reading, writing and math.
And ACT, the nonprofit that administers the college-admission exam of the same name, has a National Career Readiness Certificate, which measures skills such as synthesizing and applying information presented graphically.
Educational Testing Service was surprised to learn through a survey last spring that more than a quarter of businesses were using the GRE to evaluate job applicants, said David Payne, an ETS vice president.
Sean Keegan, a 2011 graduate of Tufts University, has posted his GRE on his resume because he landed in the 97th percentile, even though he isn't applying to graduate school. "I think it shows I'm relatively smart," said Mr. Keegan, who is looking for work in finance. "So far, I've gotten a lot of positive feedback from employers."
Thank god I got out of it before stuff like this happens. You can't quantify a person based on one number, no matter what type of number it is. Brown did it best, forget the GPA, talk about skills, you either have those skills or you don't have those skills. Interviewers should rely on their own, customized, targeted, and specific assessments to see whether a candidate is competent. Recruiting for investment banking? Ask them to submit a model or a slide deck. Recruiting for trading? Give them a case study and ask for an evaluation of or creation of a trading strategy. Concerned about time management, efficiency, and productivity? Ask them to do these assessments in-person.
It's absolutely stupid that employers never (or rarely) look at the courses you actually took to see if you took anything relevant, instead they just jump to the X out of 4.0 statistic which means nothing if you took easy classes.
Totally agree.
LOVE LOVE LOVE THIS.
Can't wait to see the first batch of fuckwits who went $100,000 in debt for a four-year party walk away empty handed. You want fries with that?
Awesome.
They need to take it one step further and offer the test to everyone, regardless of college attendance. Pass the test, get the degree. Done and done.
Well you would be screwed at any reading comprehension part of the exam. See the section that already states that the test would be open to anyone.
.
Turns out I may be the one wrong here. I think I misunderstood your comment. Fair point
Foot into mouth...
Some schools are kind of already doing that. I expect to see this become more the norm.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014241278873233011045782559923792285…
College is kind of a joke. It's more of a "are you like me" thing than a "wow you really know your stuff" thing.
With you on this EB......
This is a great opportunity for colleges and univeristies who currently rank lower on the 'prestige-o-meter' to show that they are doing a good job educating their students and attract some more quality students. Along the same lines, you may even see community colleges show that they are doing a better job teaching freshman and sophmore level courses than their four year counterparts. A lot of great opportunity for these types of educational institutions.
To take it a step further, what if a for-profit like University of Phoenix starts churning out graduates with better exit scores than many of its not-for-profit, state and endowment supported peers?
This makes a lot of sense - yea the number will the flaws, but it's better than what we got right now. And no way employers are going to look at courses - they are just as arbitray as GPA
I'm very much in favor of moving to a system that rewards knowledge rather than how the knowledge was acquired. A lot of what I learned in school was learned independently rather than when I was physically in the classroom. It would also be a monumental step forward to permit individuals to self-study and learn at their own pace. Growing up, I always excelled in math and was behind in history. If I didn't have to wait for every single person in my class to understand a concept before moving on, I would have been able to complete the K-12 math curriculum much faster. The opposite holds true for history classes. I'm sure my lack of history knowledge held up a ton of my peers that otherwise would have progressed at a far more rapid pace.
Unfortunately, I think the execution of this initiative will be very difficult. I understand how an organization can devise a single test to evaluate concrete subject areas such as arithmetic and algebra, but how does one determine if an individual has the capacity for "critical thinking?" Seems awfully subjective to me.
I agree with the above. However, IQ tests err when they try measure intellect from a male WASP centric view of the world. Instead we need tests that do not discriminate against ESL people, and we need to measure intellect, for lack of a better word, in terms of Philosophical Quotient (PQ).
“Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open” -- Ludwig Wittgenstein.
@CompBanker I think most IQ tests are a fair measure of critical thinking. You don't? Abstract thinking, anyway.
Perhaps Eddie, but I don't put a lot of stock in them. When I think of critical thinking, I think of it in terms of testing one's ability to analyze a situation and draw an appropriate conclusion. Similar to the critical reasoning section of the GMAT. You're given a set of facts and it is up to you to draw an accurate conclusion (or some variation thereof). A logic test if you will.
The more I think about it, I suppose it is possible. However, this test is being used as a "final-exam" for college students to test real-world preparedness. I like the concept of a universal test that measures general aptitude, but those already exist. How do you a create a test that says "this person has sufficiently learned the skills expected of a college graduate?" Colleges teach a different set of skills to individuals depending on their major and chosen career path. Are the college-level communications skills expected of an English major going to be the same for an electrical engineering major?
Well, the engineering discipline has been doing this already for years and years. My fellow engineering graduates probably know all about the Professional Engineers exam, or 'PE' exam as it is commonly called. Every engineering major can elect to take it (totally voluntary), regardless of engineering discipline. It tests a lot of the basic things that all Engineering majors take in their sophmore and junior years, without getting into the detail that would make the test too specific for one particular discipline. To be fair, I do not remember if EE majors took it as they take a different set of courses from the outset while Mech E, Aero, Marine, Civil, etc. take most of the same stuff for the first few years. What it tested was to make sure you had a good grasp of the basics: Calculus, Physics, Chemistry, Statics, Dynamics, materials science, Strengths of Materials, a basic EE section, and some critical reasoning.
I imagine that this test would become something like that, except tailored to a general college education curriculum. I would guess you would want sections on Math (covering thru Calc I or II), some basic science, writing (to test expository skills, plus basic english grammar), western civilization (which most places do not require, but should) and maybe a few other things.
Thoughts?
I like quote by @"CompBanker". The one challenge with creating major specific tests is measuring knowledge objectively in subjects with a great deal of theoretical controversy. Economics is a good example; the exam essays are often ask normative questions masquerading as positive questions.
Good point.
Any test can be 'gamed', and so the very idea of one static test given to everyone is pretty useless in terms of measuring intelligence. For instance, I got a near-perfect SAT back in the day and I don't think I'm smart, I just memorized a bunch of prep books.
Intelligence is not objective and so its measurement cannot be either.
You can still designs tests so difficult it cannot be reasonably gamed - not unless the student dedicates a ridiculous amount of time to it, in which case, proves their ability and dedication anywasy.
The Putnam Exam is a perfect example of this. Anyone who scores high enough can absolutely handle the best math PhDs programs. The exam curve is so difficult that most students don't even bother studying for it seriously. Still they take to see where they place amongst the nation.
Obviously you can't have a median score of 0 or 1 out of 120 like the Putnam... but I like the idea of a test so difficult that obtaining a perfect score happens only once every few years.
Because such a test serves no purpose for the general public other than to identity that one person that didn't need any extra identification in the first place...
I like the idea generally. If they could make it a few smaller tests that test your knowledge in disparate areas, that would be better. The SAT II would probably be a better model than the SAT I.
The biggest problem is that people will be teaching to the test, but it's still better than nothing. Another big problem is that you will mostly see people from 2nd tier and lower schools taking the test. Why would you take it if you're from Harvard? So, unfortunately, the test will be a signal in itself.
I think they will have the most success with the test if they target STEM majors where there is substantially less subjectivity than humanities, where nobody expects graduates to know anything anyway.
They already do this for STEM to a certain extent. For example, if someone graduates college and wants to be a professional engineer, they need to pass some standardized tests. I would argue though that this is primarily a measure of competence and not intelligence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentals_of_Engineering_exam
All these tests are making me dizzzzy. Props to 'bams for advocating for 2-year law school
I agree with the statement of focused interviews, requiring the candidates to "do something a little extra" to show their interest. I'd respect a kid who prepared a 5-page ER report a helluva lot more than an ivy kid who says they're just interested in finance. Hell, that's how I got a lot of people to talk to me.
Tests like this (including SAT, ACT,etc.) are horse shit. Actual horse shit. I raised my ACT score in a few months from mid 20's to 33 by just studying the questions being asked. There was no intelligence involved, just memorization. If anything, it should show dedication to working hard more than intelligence.
Oh lord...."Hi WSO, My CLA score is xxxx, do I have a realistic chance of working for the Goldman Sachs?"
I'm glad they didn't have such a test while I was in college. I would have gone to class even less assuming I could crush it at the end. Kinda like high school...
Its going to turn into highschool where curriculum is loosely veiled SAT prep programs. This won't educate anyone, save for education on how to ace the CLA.
Agree with above poster about Brown - it isn't about a number, its about what you can actually bring to the table.
Next stop: world domination by Asian students.
Nah, employers would just discriminate against Asians by expecting higher test scores. Just like (I believe) colleges do today.
You go to high school to do algebra and critical reading. By the time you are at university, you should be focusing on learning actual skills, like accounting, or theatre, or biology, or Chinese history. It makes no sense to then give people an SAT-like test to measure how well they learned biology. Furthermore, the scores on this test should generally reflect the kind of scores that the person got on their SAT and would not measure the real product of 4 years of study.
Spot on
Love this. I should start a CLA tutoring company.
I have to admire this attempt to extort money from every college graduate in the country. Drop $100K per year on office expenses and charge $35 per student X ~1M grads = $35M = a fucking brilliant business model. This doesn't even include the study guides you could hawk for $100 a pop. Genius.
This won't be taken seriously. We already have the DAT, MAT, SAT, ACT, LSAT, MCAT, GMAT, PCAT, VCAT, OAT, and GRE to provide a barometer for industry/thinking specific aptitude. It will never happen.
I do not understand why you either your have to goto to college and become a corporate slave banker or you went to school for a "four-year perceived party". Just two extremes.
Seriously is the only value you all see in a college education to become best damn trained monkey slave Goldman/P&G/GE/Google can buy? Is that really it? So what makes us the best employee for P&G should be what our education and knowledge is based on?
I am stunned some of you, especially like Eddie who post always about free-thinkers, outside the box entrepreneurs etc...Think that education should solely come down to a test that proves if you are the best slave that could work 140hour weeks at Goldman.
This is a fair point, and you can consider me sufficiently chastised. Admittedly, I have a deep seated hostility towards formal education that is not altogether rational, and a large part of it stems from the cookie-cutter drones you described which colleges seem content to crank out year after year ad nauseum. All my adult life I've been forced to fight an uphill battle professionally because I couldn't bring myself to bear another four years of school despite repeatedly placing in the top 3% of American adults in IQ. It gets tiresome.
That said, the overt discrimination motivated me to do some pretty amazing things and start some really cool companies. Also put me in a position to utterly terrorize entitled college kids when they came into my crosshairs.
These tests are an idiot mistake, not unlike idiot Bush II's idiot policy of "No Child Left Behind". I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. I'm glad I'm not in college. I fee bad for kids these days, they're going to work harder to learn a less applicable set of knowledge, and will have to justify their existance to a level that makes the judges (aka, previous generations) look mighty incompetant and hyppocritical to hold others to that standard. The best don't need help and the worst have no use for it: what this will succeed in doing is making life harder for the majority in the middle. More effort will be required to accomplish not that much more, and if Congress had any sense, this is the idea they should be blocking.
As a straight A student in high school who got C's in college, found a job and has already been accepted to some grad programs, I can say with some certainty that neither set of grades prepared me for the real world. What mattered was getting experience any way I could, in any industry/job that would have me, and then leveraging that against another position. Working hard, building relationships, and being smart but not necessarily brilliant are all it takes. Education in graduate vocational schools is one thing, but college is supposed to be a broad based exercise in meta thinking, and trying to upgrade the process via standardization is going to backfire.
There will always be fierce competition and strict tests to get certain entry level positions, but just like overbuilding an area.....this tends to sap the vitality out of the system. When you produce a culture of box checkers, all you're doing is pushing the most aggressive and non conformist of the smart people into a sub culture that will take on a life of its own at some point. I'm speaking in very broad terms, so feel free to argue any one point, but the overriding concern is whether or not future generations are empowered and educated to be productive....taking tests is just one facet of this. It seems the baby boomer generation are extremely blind to this, but this president and the last are almost total imbeciles when it comes to education policy.
SOLUTION?
It would accomplish more to have full disclosure of what jobs, what salaries, and what grad school acceptance rates (and at what programs) a college produces. These speak for themselves, no fancy metrics or testing required. Think about it: if you're looking for a certain job, you don't even bother applying to MBA programs that don't produce in that sector. Why should undergrad be any different? Programs that can't offer good post graduation options either have to improve OR DIE. Colleges have come and gone, just like employers, and allowing institutions to fail or forcing them to reorganize is inevitable.
If they want, the gov't could require colleges to be culpable for some of the tuition ....OR, even better..... for a portion of the debt incurred by its graduates. This way the college has a vested interest in the financial success of its graduates. Colleges at this point have no financial accountability, and this would bring swift and enduring change. The details of such an arrangement can be haggled over, but the more immediate purpose of this is to force educational institutions to prepare kids for what's next. Think of it this way: colleges are keen to collect on alum donations, but they don't do anything to help those that aren't making a living....there's no negative financial repercussion for producing poorly performing students. Yes reputation can be a factor, but look how long the law school bubble festered before people figured out what's up. The most draconian approach would be for the gov't to delegate colleges as the underwriters of student debt, not unlike the federal flood program, and then colleges would think twice before putting themselves on the hook. I'm sure the brilliant financiers on this site could come up with various flavors of this concept.
If the gov't wanted to ensure academic integrity, all it has to do is audit the examinations given and the grading at the top end of each department. Those found lacking would face losing their accreditation. A system for this is already in place, it's just not being enforced. They gov't could also contract liasons with employers to help colleges design curriculums more relevant to the knowledge needed to actually get somewhere. There are endless ways that this could be applied, but I see no mention of it in the public debate. While I do believe that the market will serve as the ultimate guide in the long term, these are the structural aspects that need to be addressed by the gov't in the short term.
CONCLUSION:
All that these tests will do is twist the curriculum to serve the purpose of beating the tests. And who says the tests are useful indicators of anything? What criterion are they using? I think that Mr. Obama's technocratic approach to this is myopic and misguided, as well as hyppocritical: ratings systems fail when most needed, as evidenced by the global financial crisis stemming from a housing bubble predicated on A ratings for what were essentially garbage securities........now we're supposed to put faith in this extremely flawed approach for the instruction of future generations? These are our children, the very future of the country, and we're supposed to hand them over en masse to an arbitrary set of tests? They have this in Europe and it doesn't work very well.
My guess is that aside from a portion who are good test takers, an increasing amount of success is going to be built upon experience and networking. Think of all the tech companies founded by college dropouts who are now picky about grades, and how the best aren't going to want to get a job at these places. They will start their own, or apply their knowledge in different departments of unrelated companies. Meanwhile, average people, the bread and butter of every system, will be forced to jump through more BS hoops just to make enough to live. And the colleges will still rake in the dough.
This will ultimately change very little for the majority of people, aside from people having to learn more useless crap just to get an entry level job fetching coffee. One other thing: IQ tests are worthless as an indicator of productivity. This is well documented by the psychological community. In fact, most of what I'm saying above is: but the politicians don't want to hear it because they're blinded by ideology. This will succeed in making students pay for what is the colleges' fault. What this is designed to do is create more a more "compliant" system, not necessarily a more productive one.
Food for thought.
UFO insider, I gave you an SB. Your post was great. It's crazy to think I never considered the quality of OCR/where grads work and got how much $/etc. when I applied for UG. If that we're the case, many schools would indeed DIE - or just be cheap.
I'm not from US, but this doesn't make sense. GPA is a weighted average of all tests. Why one test should be better than it? Honestly, no tests would accurately measure whatever you want to measure. It is a bad solution.
Or colleges could, you know, stop arbitrarily assigning GPA numbers based on curves relative to how everyone else is doing. They could put a little effort into checking professors' fairness.
This new exam will start out as voluntary, but will become mandatory. It's a solution in search of a problem. Don't fix the existing metric, just add another test, another hoop to jump through for people who have already worked hard for a good GPA.
Some people are gaming it, so punish everybody. Wonderful.
First of all the SAT is not memorization you can logic your way to a good score as I did (2370 superscore, took twice), with little to no studying. Seriously, 90% of the questions you can eliminate answers and then pick the right one.
But standardized tests are bull shit. A real job is not a chess match, your logical and critical thinking skills simply need to be adequate. A real job has certain core competencies (modeling, for example) that are far more important to the success of the job. Which, why I said before, companies should do their own assessments.
This is an awful idea. Very few bankers use any calculus, let alone Taylor series or whatever it is that they teach you in Calc II. They use arithmetic for the most part. Western civilization? Are you kidding me?
You can't make a one size fits all test. A doctor requires different skills from a financial analyst who requires different skills from a programmer. Test on those skills, don't test on some general knowledge curriculum that selects for candidates who are a jack of all trades and a master of none.
Not that my score was dramatically worse or anything, but c'mon...if it was THAT easy everyone would kill it, and everyone obviously doesn't.
The "It's so easy to get 99th percentile SAT, 4.0 GPA, get into Princeton undergrad, get hired at Goldman, get 99th percentile GMAT, and get into HBS" attitude around here is annoying. We get it - you're awesome.
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