There’s about to be another GRE score for programs to use when they’re considering which applicants to admit for graduate work. The Educational Testing Service’s “Personal Potential Index” distills “an applicant’s personality … into six traits, and the applicant is rated on each of them by various professors and former supervisors on a scale of 1 to 5.” The five dimensions are knowledge and creativity, communication skills, teamwork, resilience, planning and organization, and ethics and integrity, and there’s also an overall rating. Some additional information is here.
To a considerable degree, this new scoring system simply standardizes what’s already being done by schools themselves on their own application forms, which routinely ask those writing reference letters to rate applicants on various desiderata. Still, it’s interesting to think about how some of the more colorful characters in our discipline would have scored on these dimensions when they were applying for admission, and even whether they’d have gotten admitted in the first place.