Grades, test scores, activities are important, but the real predictor of success is grit Bob Driehaus 4:16 PM, Jan 24, 2015 CINCINNATI – What ingredients make for a successful college student? The answer isnt always As and Bs in high school or good test scores. The students most likely to excel and graduate on time? The gritty ones. College admissions officer are putting more weight on a somewhat inexact but genuine attribute in their decisions: grit. The term may sound unscientific, but Angela Duckworth, a University of Pennsylvania psychology professor has researched it and she defined it this way in a TED talk: Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality. Grit is living life like its a marathon, not a sprint, she said. Students with grit may be the ones who get decent, but not great grades, while holding down a part-time or even full-time job in high school. They may be succeeding in school despite being saddled with parents who are suffering from drug addiction. University of Cincinnati College of Nursing Dean Greer Glazer told UCs board of trustees recently about an applicant whose 3.0 grade point average didnt match up to that colleges 3.66 average but whose ACT score was six points above the average 26. Pure numbers would have kept him out of the program, but the school factored in that he was a low-income, first-generation student, a wrestler who never won a match but rooted passionately for teammates and worked 40 hours a week to support his jobless parents and his siblings. UC accepted him into the nursing program, and he made the deans list with a 4.0 GPA in spring 2014. Many private schools like Xavier University have delved more deeply into prospective students stories for decades, reading personal essays and letters of recommendation from students and looking beyond letter grades to whether they skated by with easy electives or pushed themselves with Advanced Placement courses. Weve really been looking for students who have shown resilience or leadership or academic success. We want to assess your ability to tough it out and do the work at Xavier. Weve really been looking beyond grades and test scores, said Aaron Meis, XUs dean of undergraduate admissions and financial aid. He said the deeper dive into student profiles results in hundreds of students being admitted out of 11,000 applicants who might have grades or test scores below XUs average. At big state institutions like University of Cincinnati, less attention was given to applications due to the expense of potentially sifting through tens of thousands of essays. But UC has seized on grit as a vehicle to accomplish its goals of boosting retention and graduation rates and diversifying its student body. Grit is a more important test than almost anything else, probably more important than grade point average or standardized test scores, UC President Santa Ono told WCPO. Its very central to what we do, especially in our more selective colleges – CCM, DAAP, the Lindner business school, the College of Engineering. What were really trying to accomplish is to probe their life experiences, probe their commitment to a specific experience for evidence theyve rebounded from a setback, he said. The search for grit has gone universitywide at UC since 2013 when it adopted the Common Application for prospective students, a standardized form that colleges across the country accept. It includes written components that allow for students to demonstrate their mettle. It does help us make better decisions and it allows us to create a greater diversity across the university, said Caroline Miller, UCs senior associate vice president for enrollment management. A student who is viewed as being a mile deep and a foot wide is going to embrace their classes. The student who has taken a tougher curriculum is better prepared. Skeptics might view grit as a passing buzzword, one that cant replace concrete statistics like grades and test scores. Duckworths research found that its real. She and a team of academic researchers studied students at Ivy League schools, West Point and even contestants in the Scripps National Spelling Bee. The results: • Ivy League students who were predetermined to have grit had higher grades than those who didnt. • West Point students with grit were less likely to drop out of the military academy. • Spelling bee contestants with grit -- doing things like studying more on weekends – were 41 percent more likely to advance to further rounds than those without. Its not news to Miami University, which devotes 30 staff members to reading every page of the 25,000 applications it receives each year. We conduct a thorough, holistic review of each application where others may rely on GPA and standardized test scores, said Susan Schaurer, interim director of admission at Miami. Students have to be academically prepared, of course, but life experiences, things that they have gone through greatly determine how theyll address the academic challenges at Miami and whether theyll take advantage of opportunities they have here. Identifying what Duckworth and others have coined as grit has been essential to finding successful students at Miami, she said. It is somewhat of a buzzword in higher education right now, but its something that Miami has been incorporating into the process for many years, Schaurer said. Northern Kentucky University does not gauge grit in its application process, which does not include a mandatory essay, according to Melissa Gorbandt, director of admissions, but the university is trying to foster grit in the students who are enrolled. As part of our overall student success initiative, we do see a component of success that has been identified as grit, and were looking at how we can foster that in our students, she said. There are some folks that believe that grit is teachable, and were looking at those success factors and how we can weave them into our current students. Until 2005, NKU had open enrollment, accepting all applicants who completed the paperwork and had a diploma or GED. It still accepts 91 percent of applicants, Gorbandt said, facilitating the need to guide less prepared students to success. Weve spent quite a bit of time and research internally on how we can build networks for students to ensure their success, she said. Kristi Lehmer, executive director of enrollment management at Thomas More College, said the small Catholic institution does not require essays but looks for characteristics that can be defined as grit in things like extracurricular activities. We like to meet students face to face and we really push for campus visits. Thats when you really get a feel for that student. You see what their interest level is with the college, she said. UCs Ono hopes the value of grit filters down to students in a way that encourages them to take risks to find their passions. A lot of students are so caught up in the sprint to college that they don’t understand that life is a marathon and not a sprint. Youre going to run out of gas too soon if you sprint, he said. We owe it to high school students and educators to get that across to students. If you fail you become stronger and better able to deal with future challenges.
Posted on: Sun, 25 Jan 2015 02:10:53 +0000
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