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My hope is that that, in the future, college and university admissions tests will more comprehensively assess the full range of skills that are important for success, both in school and in life. three additional hours of testing time can ensure greater accu- racy and equity in the admissions process, the time cost seems insignificant when compared to the thousands of hours a stu- dent will spend attending college or business school. Concern about time and money is not the only obstacle preventing universities from implementing new assessments such as ours. Inevitably, it is difficult to bring about any change to an entrenched system that not only seems to work, but also provides a steady income flow to the organizations that embrace it. In addition, schools may resist implementing broader tests for other reasons: s Unfamiliarity. Some people have a fear of innovation in general. Others distrust the new tests because they have yet to prove themselves fully. s Pseudo-quantitative precision. When people see numbers coming from a test, they tend to think the numbers are high- ly valid, whether or not they are. s Culpability. People in admissions may fear they will be blamed if they admit someone who did poorly on a conven- tional test and that person then does not succeed. s Similarity. Currently, many people who are promoted to successively higher positions in the school pyramid are those who excel in analytical skills, as opposed to creative or practi- cal ones. Conventional tests control admission not only to elite schools, but also to the job opportunities that are open to graduates of these schools. People who succeed under any system tend to value the existing system because it got them where they are. Additionally, people who are not creative often do not themselves particularly value creativity. s Publication. Scores on conventional tests are widely pub- lished and instrumental in determining business school rank- ings. Institutions have become obsessive about keeping their conventional test scores high so as to raise their ratings. s Expectancy effects. Whenever a specific trait is valued, it tends to create self-fulfilling prophecies. Individuals who excel at that trait are expected to succeed, and often they do. If they don't excel in that trait, they are expected not to succeed, and often they don't. I hope times change, but we are not cur- rently living through the most progressive era in U.S. histo- ry—quite the contrary. The Benefits of Testing I emphasize that the tests we have devised are not intended to be used by themselves. They are supplements to, rather than replacements for, conventional tests. It is important to meas- ure conventional analytical skills in addition to the creative and practical ones. Although some schools have stopped requiring SAT tests 26 BizEd JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2006 as part of the admissions process, I am not an advocate of eliminating tests altogether. Tests were created to solve a problem. Before they were devised to aid in the process, admissions depended very heavily on social status, parental wealth, whether the student had attended a prestigious inde- pendent school, and so forth. Other current measures are equally ambiguous. Letters of recommendations are often inflated and not always truthful. Grades can mean very differ- ent things at different schools, as can involvement in extracur- ricular activities. Without tests, we might end up falling back on more traditional criteria or depend too heavily on unreli- able measures. We live in times in which there is great emphasis on how much students know rather than on whether they can use what they know in a reflective and constructive way. Current educational policies risk developing people who know a lot but do not think critically, wisely, or well with the knowledge they have. Over the years, U.S. business has seen more than its share of such people in power—at Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Arthur Andersen, and Adelphia, to name a few—not to mention in government. To break this cycle, and balance what students know with what they can do, we should not give fewer tests. Instead, we should devise better, more com- prehensive ones that enable everyone to show their patterns of strengths. For More Information About the Rainbow Project: Articles describing this test and the data have been published in The Educational Psychologist, in Change Magazine, and in Choosing Students, a book edit- ed by Wayne J. Camara and Ernest W. Kimmel. About the University of Michigan Business School Test: An article describing this test and the data can be found in The Educa - tional Psychologist; a much more detailed article is scheduled to appear in the journal Learning and Individual Differences. About the correlations between conventional intelligence tests and multiple-intelligence tests: Data can be found in the book Prac - tical Intelligence in Everyday Life, by Robert Sternberg and collaborators, as well as in many published refereed articles. About Tacit Knowledge tests and their correlations with leadership ratings: These are described in an article published in the journal Leadership Quarterly. The study and the results repre- sent a collaboration with Jennifer Hedlund, George B. Forsythe, Joseph Horvath, Wendy Williams, and Scott Snook.