Articles from CollegeNET

CollegeNET, a provider of innovative software solutions for higher education, today announced the appointment of Bill Brice as Chief Executive Officer.

The fundamental deficiency in traditional achievement testing has been that these tests measure only the dependent variables of academic performance (e.g., how much math does a student already know?). This creates a paradox from an educational perspective. At the same time a college is aiming to teach a subject, it is constrained by traditional assessments to favor and select candidates who already know the most about that subject, not necessarily those who would attack and learn the subject with the highest persistence and discipline. Although assessing a dependent variable such as a student’s math skills provides indirect evidence that high-scoring candidates may also possess the independent skills around persistence and struggle that drive math skill acquisition and learning, this causation is by no means certain. Particularly in today’s era of SAT super-scoring where students take standardized tests multiple times and both the student and the school choose their highest score, irrelevant factors such as guessing, statistical anomaly, expensive test coaching, and the family’s capability to pay for multiple tests all blur away the ability of the school to discern the key behavioral traits around consistency, discipline and practice that drive academic and career performance. These test prep techniques and strategies—all overwhelmingly available to richer students and families—thus bias educational testing to the wealthy, further exacerbate our national decline in social mobility, and suppress recognition and educational opportunity for less well-off students who may, in fact, possess superior skills and discipline around practice and struggle.

According to a popular myth, in order to reach mastery and expertise you must first put in 10,000 hours of practice. Pioneering Human Performance researcher at Florida State University, Dr. Anders Ericsson, recently stepped forward to clarify this myth. According to Ericsson’s book “Peak,” what counts towards building expertise is what he calls “deliberate practice.” Deliberate practice distills to four independent variables: practice, consistency of practice, tracking your practice, and “mental mapping.” CollegeNET has demonstrated through both its November and December StandOut Challenge Interview competitions that the company's new, patent-pending FocusRing technology can assess these attributes at scale for the first time. FocusRing presents candidates with a video question script that probes for the independent variables of practice, and then gives each candidate the task of scoring the video answer scripts submitted by other randomly assigned candidates. The requirement for peer review and evaluation forces each candidate to listen to, learn from and make judgments about what others are saying. These key academic and social engagement skills are neither exercised nor tested by traditional assessments such as the SAT or ACT.