There's an interesting piece in today's NY Times about what factors predict whether people will be good doctors. Everyone currently focuses on things like the MCAT, which measures some combination of basic domain knowledge and cognitive skills. What the Journal of Applied Psychology study described in the Times found is that personality matters a great deal.

At the start of the study, the researchers administered a standardized personality test and assessed each student for five different dimensions of personality — extraversion, neuroticism, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness. They then followed the students through their schooling, taking note of the students’ grades, performance and attrition rates.

The investigators found that the results of the personality test had a striking correlation with the students’ performance. Neuroticism, or an individual’s likelihood of becoming emotionally upset, was a constant predictor of a student’s poor academic performance and even attrition. Being conscientious, on the other hand, was a particularly important predictor of success throughout medical school. And the importance of openness and agreeableness increased over time, though neither did as significantly as extraversion. Extraverts invariably struggled early on but ended up excelling as their training entailed less time in the classroom and more time with patients.

Google tried a similar exercise a few years back with software engineers and had enough success that the results have been incorporated into hiring process: Google Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm

I think it would be both fascinating and useful to examine the question of what factors predict success in science and engineering more broadly. The current approach seems all to focused on measures of convenience like GRE scores and fuzzy things like intuition. There are a lot of assumptions about who will be good that I think warrant empirical testing.