Assessing Soft Skills in Higher Education: Best Practices and Tools for Holistic Admissions

Soft skills like communication, self-awareness, resilience, or empathy are important for individuals to succeed in higher education (e.g., medical, engineering, or business school). It is therefore important to effectively assess such soft skills when admitting students into education programs. Yet, such assessments must demonstrate predictive validity (i.e., performance in a test or interview should be related to success in school and later in professional settings). A key challenge is to evaluate success in higher education, especially using indicators beyond pure academic performance (e.g., grades, time-to-graduation). This project, a collaboration between Dr. Nicolas Roulin at Saint Mary’s University and Acuity Insights, aims to review multiple literatures to create a comprehensive framework to assess soft skills, soft skills development over time, and holistically evaluate (and predict) student success in higher education. The project will also represent a blueprint that Acuity Insights can use to work with higher education programs to provide comprehensive evidence for the validity of the Casper test (which Acuity owns and administers) and other assessments used in admission.

Faculty Supervisor:

Nicolas Roulin

Student:

Partner:

Acuity Insights

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Education; Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

Saint Mary's University

Program: