UT Austin - Kids selected on test scores have better personalities than those selected on "personality"
UT Austin recently retweeted / posted this on X.
This sounds counter-intuitive, but I think it makes a lot of sense.
When you select students based on standardized tests like the SAT or ACT, you're controlling for high academic aptitude but with no controls for personality. You could end up with a genius kid who plays LOL all day in his mom's basement who retweets Truth Social slop on X, but you also could have a 150+ IQ, charming, 6'3" Clavicular-looking athlete who gets straight As without trying.
To put it succinctly, you're not controlling for personality at all, so you end up with a very interesting and diverse cohort.
Now if you compare that with what happens today when colleges try to control the personalities of their kids, you have grade-grubbers who pick classes based on how easy the instructors are; you have strivers who care more about landing a "prestige" occupation than on expanding their minds; you have a dull college culture where everything is about trumping your classmates down to the last hundredth of their GPA. More importantly, everyone just thinks the same and there's hardly anything interesting about the student body - they're soulless and vapid.
Ultimately, colleges should care less about "personality". Pretty much every personal statement and EC list are borderline fraudulent and meant to sell a facade to colleges. Colleges genuinely can't tell a student's personality no matter what they write in their essays or what their activities were or what their teachers say. The only way to get a cohort that is academically brilliant but also interesting and diverse is to use only test scores for admissions.