What Happens Once the Test is Over

A study by the University of Michigan Law School found that LSAT scores bore virtually no relationship to career success as measured by levels of income, life satisfaction or public service. Even the NFL Combine is a big waste of time. According to a recent study by economists at the University of Louisville, there’s no “consistent statistical relationship” between the results of players at the Combine and subsequent NFL performance.

The reason maximal measures are such bad predictors is rooted in what these tests don’t measure. It turns out that many of the most important factors for life success are character traits, such as grit and self-control, and these can’t be measured quickly.

The problem, of course, is that students don’t reveal their levels of grit while taking a brief test. Grit can only be assessed by tracking typical performance for an extended period. Do people persevere, even in the face of difficulty? How do they act when no one else is watching? Such traits often matter more than raw talent. We hear about them in letters of recommendation, but hard numbers take priority.

The larger lesson is that we’ve built our society around tests of performance that fail to predict what really matters: what happens once the test is over.

Jonah Lehrer
author of How We Decide

Grit

Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania is best known for her work on grit, a character trait that allows people to persist in the face of difficulty. A few years ago, she was commissioned by the Army to measure the grittiness of cadets at West Point. Although the academy is highly selective, about 5 percent of cadets drop out after the first summer of training, known as Beast Barracks. The Army has long searched for the variables that predict which cadets will graduate, but it wasn't until Duckworth tested them using a short questionnaire -- consisting of statements such as "Setbacks don't discourage me" or "I am diligent" -- that the Army found a measurement that actually worked. Duckworth has since repeated the survey with subsequent West Point classes, and the results are always the same: The cadets who graduate are the ones with grit.

In a new paper, Duckworth and Ericsson demonstrate that grit doesn't only keep people from dropping out, but it's also what allows them to become experts, to put in the hours of deliberate practice. The researchers tracked 190 participants at the Scripps National Spelling Bee. The first thing they discovered is that deliberate practice works. Student spellers who spent more time studying alone and memorizing words with the help of note cards performed much better than kids who were quizzed by friends or engaged in leisure reading. Duckworth and Ericsson also found that levels of grit determined how much the spellers were willing to practice. Grittier kids were able to engage in the most useful kinds of self-improvement, which is why they performed at a higher level. Woody Allen famously declared, "Eighty percent of success is showing up." And grit is what allows you to show up, again and again and again.

Jonah Lehrer author of How We Decide writing in ESPN the Magazine

Seeing and Dreaming

Some men see things as they are and say, "Why?" I dream of things that never were and say, "Why not?"

George Bernard Shaw