Employers are missing something

My boss left an interest press release on my desk today as an FYI.

The release came from the Association of American Colleges and Universities, and was titled, "Multiple Choice Tests and Institutional Assessments Judged Ineffective by Employers Looking for Improvements in College Learning."

A lot of the release is pretty basic, and says things we all (should) have known for years: not everyone does well on multiple choices. Employers have decided test scores and college transcripts aren't that important as they decide whether or not to hire a candidate. The methods colleges use to measure "institutional knowledge," or how well all students at a college have learned the same curriculum, don't actually tell that much about the level of education an individual student receives.

It's good colleges are acknowledging this.

But I have a beef with employers.

Employers find college transcripts of limited use in evaluating college graduates' potential to succeed in the workplace. Only 13% of employers find transcripts very useful. Sixty-seven percent find transcripts just somewhat or not useful.

OK, a 3.6 GPA isn't going to tell you exactly everything you need to know about a potential employee. But I think there is a lot of value to the letters and numbers on a transcript.

If you get an applicant who seems really motivated and has lots of great ideas and recommendations, that's good. But what if he has a 1.9 GPA? What does that tell you about how motivated he was to go to his classes and excel in coursework that attempted to prepare him to work for you? Was he perhaps just as motivated when he got to college, but decided it was too much work? I think a transcript can open up a lot of potential questions like these, and they're important questions.

If I were hiring college grads, I'd want to know why there are deficiencies in their schoolwork. Why would you do anything you can't excel at? (That's my personal philosophy: don't do anything you can't do well.) And if you're bad at something that's preparing you for a future job, why would I believe you'd be any better at the job than you were at preparatory coursework?

There is a good amount of importance to the transcript. You just need to think critically when you look at it.

Other interesting points from the release:

A majority of employers (57 percent) think that half or fewer college graduates have the full set of skills and knowledge needed for advancement in today's workplace.

Employers prefer assessments that require students to demonstrate depth of knowledge and advanced capacities in problem-solving, writing, and analytic reasoning. They believe that multiple choice tests and assessments that evaluate institutions rather than individual students are the wrong choices for assessment and accountability in higher education.

The data the release was written about came from the Liberal Education and America's Promise (LEAP) initiative, and can be found online in a report, "College Learning for the New Global Century", if you have any desire to read it.