Along with other notable business schools, Yale School of Management is part of a trend that's testing prospective students for their ability to understand the causes of emotions.
The difference in Yale's assessment, however, is that the school has teamed up with researchers at EI Skills Group to create their own test, which is currently being offered on a voluntary basis and won't be a factor in the school's highly selective application process right now, but it's uncertain what Yale will do with the results in the future.
The idea is that leadership requires an ability to read people, accurately understand and manage emotions, communicate effectively, and adapt quickly to other cultures.
To get a sense of what the 141-items on Yale's Mayer, Salovey, Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test consist of, we reached out to David Caruso, special assistant to the Dean at Yale College, who's been working with other researchers on the emotional ability assessment for the past 15 years.
"One key is that when you ask people how emotionally intelligent they think they are that their answers often bear little relation to their actual ability," Caruso tells us. "This makes a lot of sense ... someone may think they can read people really well, but if you cannot read signals you don’t get feedback that your ability to read others is faulty."
And scoring the test-takers is another complicated task, because there are no norms, or correct answers in the way that IQ tests may have, Caruso says, which may be hard for most people to understand since we are so used to finding the one right answer on tests.
The following are not actual questions that appear on the MSCEIT, but were provided to us by Caruso and are structured in a similar fashion to Yale's emotional assessment.
Check them out, and let us know in the comments if you think your answers would indicate if you would make a good leader or not.
SEE ALSO: Your Boss Probably Wouldn't Pass Yale's Emotional Intelligence Assessment
Indicate how much of each emotion is present in this picture:
Select the emotion word that best describes the expression:
Select the emotion word that best describes the expression:
See the rest of the story at Business Insider