Peer evaluations | social-quotient

Selective colleges look for more than academic skills in admitting students. The 5 colleges pictured here have been interested in what one's peers say about an applicant as an individual.

Dartmouth College (above) and Davidson College (below) welcome a recommendation letter from your classmates.

In the recent past, Princeton University (left) and Williams College (right) similarly welcomed classmate recommendations.

"Dean Rapelye (Princeton's admissions director) certainly appreciates the work you have put into this project. Thank you for letting us know about your good work." 9/29/2017

The UCLA Undergraduate Admissions office (in Los Angeles) wrote on 11/8/2017

"We appreciate and admire the work that you are doing in your Social Quotient, we hope you keep it up."

At the University of California - Santa Barbara (below) the former admissions director wrote twice to the creator of this website that an applicant's Social Quotient report would be read and evaluated along with an applicant's other papers.

As noted by Harvard's former admissions director, the Social Quotient report provides a calculated number that allows for easy comparison of an applicant's social skills, not only with one's classmates but with applicants from distant high schools. Each student's SQ score is a quotient. It takes the sum of marks (A-D, quantified) that classmates rate for one peer, then divides by the number of marks given to that student. For each classroom, the average SQ score is 100.

Colleges should note that unlike IQ type measures, Social Quotient scores did NOT show a significant difference between racial or most other physical characteristics in the 2500+ high school students surveyed in CA, NY, and PA.

At Stanford's Graduate School of Business: a huge rise in interest and courses on interpersonal skills

In 1966 there were 5 tenure line faculty in Organizational Behavior and 1 lecturer. By 2017, student demand had jumped these numbers to 28 tenure line faculty and 36 lecturers in OB, becoming the largest department at Stanford's GSB. Many of the 36 lecturers teach the Interpersonal Dynamics course nicknamed "Touchy Feely".

(Data provided by James C. VanHorne, A.P. Giannini Professor at Stanford)