When The Grauer School (CA) opened its doors in 1991, I knew we needed a better approach to admission beyond GPAs and test scores. Our mission has always emphasized cultivating perseverance, compassion, accountability, curiosity, and self-advocacy—skills that are not merely “soft” but crucial for leading a purposeful life—and I wanted our admission process to tell a story that helps families understand our mission and core values while also gaining insight into their child. It was not about labelling or ranking kids—it was about understanding them.
It was about asking: Who are the students we aspire to teach and are equipped to support at Grauer? Who will thrive in our environment, aligned with our specific values? Who will make our school better for others? Through answering these questions, we were able to delve deeper into the qualities that enabled students to thrive in a collaborative, trust-based environment.
After consulting multiple psychologists, I decided to adopt the FIRO-B, a quick, reliable psychological assessment––originally developed for the U.S. Navy to help assemble effective submarine crews––that evaluates how people behave in three key interpersonal dimensions: inclusion, control, and affection. We used the FIRO-B because it measures traits that predict whether students will feel seen, connected, and ready to grow. It even suggested who might be subject to cliques and follower behavior, which was impactful data for high schools.
For 35 years, we’ve opposed anything more than a slight focus on standardized achievement testing in admission because it fails to capture the whole student. While most of our peer schools have relied on the Independent Schools Entrance Examination (ISEE) as a primary admissions tool, we took the considerable risk of refusing to administer it. It seemed to me that the ISEE merely confirmed what was already visible in transcripts and standardized tests, but it couldn’t tell us who a student was or how they might shape and be shaped by our real mission. When applicant families inevitably asked us, “Do you test?” I always said yes, but instead we tested character.
From the beginning, our search for admission tools has been different from the standard “search for excellence.” At Grauer, we sought reliable, valid measures of traits we define as excellent—the ones written into our mission. Those are the “scores” we care about.
Why Mission-Driven?
Increasing student mental health needs, demands for deeper social-emotional learning, and calls for environmental literacy are reshaping the profile of the students independent schools serve. Without reliable, mission-driven admission tools to achieve that profile, schools risk mismatches that strain both students and communities.
Admission processes can often focus narrowly on transcripts, test scores, or ability to pay because that data is easy to get. It’s more time-consuming to measure whether the school is the right fit for a student’s emotional, social, or developmental needs. Students who need more relational support or mentoring may end up in a high-pressure environment that fuels anxiety—rather than an environment where they can express their unique callings.
Take a student who thrives on hands-on, outdoor learning; it can be heartbreaking to see them using cherished free time in tutoring sessions while, ironically, the more scholastically oriented students can finish their schoolwork with free time left over to spend outdoors that would have really sustained that other student. One student recently explained to me that this is exactly why he sometimes relies upon AI to do his chemistry homework.
Mission-driven admission tools that assess not only academic readiness but, more importantly, alignment with the school’s culture and values, better help students land in environments where they are most likely to flourish and find their calling. This reduces the chance of preventable mental health issues, eases pressure on school counselors and teachers, and helps create a community of diverse talent where students feel seen and supported.
Thoughtful admission cultivates a healthier learning ecology for everyone. Fortunately, there are many tools nowadays to choose from. For example, the Duckworth Lab’s Grit Scale, which identifies students whose perseverance may outlast those with natural academic ease, or the Mission Skills Assessment, which measures teamwork, creativity, ethics, resilience, curiosity, and time management.
Seeing more surveys that get at all those qualities come to market is, to me, one of the most exciting educational advances. Now, for example, schools that value ecological awareness as much as academic skills can assess this dimension because tools like the Nature Relatedness Scale, the Connectedness to Nature Scale, and the Inclusion of Nature in Self exist and can provide insights into an applicant’s bond with the natural world. Like math screenings used for student placement, these assessments are nationally normed and validated, so their scores offer reliable insights.
What We Use Now
At Grauer, we’ve continued to develop our own admission tools over time—essays, interviews, and community-based references—and we’ve seen a much broader range of students succeed. We created a points system in which grades and standardized scores carry no more weight than other factors on our scale, such as the FIRO-B, references, special interests, or other factors we believe reflect most directly on our mission. Together, these tools reveal values like character, curiosity, resilience, and alignment with our school’s values. The result has been a more diverse and balanced student body and fewer mismatches that put strain on students’ mental health or sense of belonging.
We hold the rising collection of character assessments for enrolled students in the same esteem as the SAT or ACT: the Panorama Student Survey, the Challenge Success Student Survey, and the High School Survey of Student Engagement (HSSSE) all assess values tied directly to our school mission. Both HSSSE and Panorama provide reliable, valid, nationally normed results that reflect our core values, and Challenge Success is making strides toward offering comparable normed data.
We administer one of these assessments to all students annually, informing our admission processes, marketing, annual goals, and graduation expectations. It’s inspiring how much better these tools align with our actual purposes than traditional tests. We even post character evaluation data on our transcripts. Someday, we hope, colleges will too.
Carrying the Mission Forward
I’ve always believed deeply in the value of these kinds of assessments, and they seem even more valuable in our current context, this moment in which colleges and universities are currently facing federal scrutiny and lawsuits related to diversity efforts that focus on GPA and standardized test scores. Stripped of context, these metrics—which for decades have been synonymous with “valid”––are often weaponized to allege “unfair” admission.
We don’t need to abandon reliability—we need to expand it. The true qualities and values (beyond academic rigor) that colleges are after are increasingly becoming measurable with rigor. Colleges already use structured interviews, performance-based assessments, and validated surveys in other contexts. Bringing these normed instruments into admission provides institutions with defensible, data-based ways to recognize multiple dimensions of student capacity—while reducing the legal exposure that comes with subjective or opaque processes. Fairness comes not from narrowing to just GPA and SAT, but from applying valid, reliable measures across a wider spectrum of human potential.
Fortunately, the evolution of values-based admission tools and strength-based assessments, psychometrically sound surveys, and interpersonal evaluations can measure personal qualities with the same rigor and precision as algebra skills.
Shifting to adopt a more holistic, mission-driven admission process doesn’t require an overhaul. Adding one or two value-based questions to an application form or interview, or piloting a survey like the Grit Scale and reviewing the results alongside student outcomes a year later, are small but impactful ways to shift the process. The HSSSE, with a little adapting from the publisher, could make for a normed admission “test,” and maybe someday it will.
At Grauer, we have found that because our admission process reflects our mission, the students and families we enroll don’t just “fit in,” they carry the mission forward. In fact, a great point of pride is that the criteria we have for our seniors’ capstone presentations are nearly identical to the admission criteria those seniors encountered six years prior. It’s a full-circle moment.
Like the Navy, we’re assembling a crew—not for stealth missions beneath the ocean, but for an expedition of learning and discovery above it, and the inclusion of a diversely talented crew makes all the difference.