About the PSQ Tool

While excellent grades and test scores are impressive accomplishments, they’re not the only indicators of future success. You can use the PSQ tool to inform pre- and post-admission decisions based on program needs by gaining insights into behavioral characteristics that are critical for success. These insights can also help inform your institutions’ goals related to diversity, holistic admission and cohort development.

Additionally, you can use the PSQ tool to inform learner development. The information collected from the PSQ will allow you to better direct efforts and resources to support learner development more effectively, particularly incoming students, as well as support your program's continuous improvement initiatives and assurance of learning process (AoL).

Inter- and intrapersonal skills predict educational and career success. Students and employees without these skills are more likely to struggle and conflict with others. Thankfully, the PSQ tool provides an easy way to get reliable data on these skills.

The PSQ tool measures 14 skill dimensions and allows you to focus on those that are most important to your program. The dimensions are:

The 14 dimensions measured by the PSQ tool are combined to create five skill area composites: Engaging with Others, Teamwork, Self-regulation, Emotional Regulation and Innovativeness. Institutions receive scores at both the dimension and composite level. Currently students receive an Insights Report showing their composite-level results.

A wide variety of evidence over decades of research shows that scores on high-quality, noncognitive measures don’t differ across race/ethnicity groups, and the PSQ tool follows in this tradition. It measures the Big Five factors of personality, which are the most robust personality traits found across cultures.

The PSQ tool is resistant to coaching, gaming and faking because it is designed in a way that learners can’t guess which answer makes them sound “best.” The format requires respondents to choose from two statements of equal appeal — which is most like them and which is least like them. The inability to prepare for or “outsmart” the tool minimizes any respondent’s chance for an unfair advantage.