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West Point stopped weeding cadets out
The grit test
For years, cadet basic training at the United States Military Academy was treated as the ultimate individual grit test. In any single year, the data backed that up: psychologist Angela Duckworth found that grittier cadets were more likely to survive it.
What forty years showed
Then she looked at four decades of data and noticed something she hadn't expected. The completion rate kept going up. Cadets weren't arriving with deeper reservoirs of willpower, and the academy hadn't made admission easier or the physical standards lighter.
The superintendent's answer
When she asked former superintendent General Robert Caslen how that was possible, his answer came immediately: it was the culture, not the cadets. West Point had moved from an attrition model, designed to weed the weak out, to a developmental model, designed to help cadets grow stronger. The people and the standards stayed the same, and the institution rebuilt the place around them so that effort actually paid off.
How was grit measured at West Point?
Angela Duckworth and colleagues define grit as perseverance and passion for long-term goals, and they measure it with a self-report questionnaire called the Grit Scale. In a 2007 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, they reported that grit predicted who completed West Point's summer training better than the academy's own Whole Candidate Score did. That score combines academic, physical, and leadership measures from a candidate's application.
Why do weed-out cultures exist in higher education?
Introductory science courses at many universities have long been described as weed-out courses, meant to filter students early. In their 1997 book Talking About Leaving, the sociologists Elaine Seymour and Nancy Hewitt studied students who left science majors. They found that those who left were often no different in ability from those who stayed, and they pointed to teaching quality and a competitive culture as common reasons for leaving.
Why do psychologists weigh environment against traits?
In 1936, the psychologist Kurt Lewin proposed that behavior is a function of the person and the environment together. In 1977, Lee Ross named the fundamental attribution error, the tendency to explain other people's actions by their character rather than their circumstances. Later research in organizations and schools has repeatedly found that the same people behave differently under different conditions. Lewin's formula is still taught in introductory psychology courses.
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