You know French employers use thoise things when hiring people.
I've really no idea if they really are a sham. I suppose.
When I applied to Brown, one had to write one's application essay in longhand.
I don't know if this was to prevent cheating, or for the purpose of handwriting analysis, but I thought it was kinda weird.
Part of me thinks it's almost as scientific as astrology, but another part of me thinks maybe there's somethng to it. I am such a Gemini.
It's not as self evidently absurd as astrolgy, but yeah. Has there been any studies refuting it?
Christ, now you've got me wondering if my tax dollars have acutally funded a study on handwriting analysis.
Wikipedia comes through: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphology#Validity
2: It wasn't for handwriting analysis. It's for at least the following two reasons.
One, they don't want you go just copy an essay you've written for another school; Brown thinks enough of itself to make sure you're going to actually write an essay for them.
Two, admissions officers read literally thousands of these essays. Having them in the handwriting helps them attach some sort of personality to each one so that they don't blur together as much, and it helps (when there's a huge pile of these to discuss) to remind everyone discussing the application that there's a real person behind each of these essays, and not just another folder to drop into a "no" or "yes" pile.
I ended up including a typed copy of my essay along with the handwritten one because my handwriting is so bad. I got in anyway.
I remember watching a BBC show years ago, hosted by Anthony Clare, which was devoted to investigating topis of this sort of thing by way of simple double-blind studies. They did one on graphology. The method was to pick a sample of people from maximally different occupations (I think they chose monks living in a monastery and West-End actors) and give anonymized samples to laypeople and "graphologists" to analyze. The finding was unequivocal: the graphologists did no better than the laypeople, and the laypeople did no better (in fact, a little worse) than chance.
The same show -- I'm blanking on its name -- did a double-blind study of homeopathy, too. In order to control for the placebo effect, they did the trial on cows suffering from mastitis, with the homeopathic remedy dropped in their feed trough every morning. The treatment group recovered from the mastitis and the control group did not, which I have to say came as a surprise.
That "must be," from someone I'd been working with for months, told the story.
Evidentially, my dear ogged.
7 -- you can copy something longhand can you not? The monks of mediæval Europe think so.
And: best way to put personality in your printouts is Comic Sans.
10: I was just about to say the same thing. Writing something out by hand doesn't mean that it's going to be original. Just ask my high school teachers.
Actually, in high school I only hand-wrote my papers about half the time. The rest of the time I typed them on a manual typewriter. God, I'm old.
12: In high school, computers had just started appearing in the past five to six years and I had a teacher who refused to accept any papers that had come off a dot-matrix printer because "you're going to college and you need to know how to use a typewriter."
No, of course you can copy something longhand. But at least you'll put some effort into your laziness. Proves you're Brown material.
I can testify from firsthand experience that at least one applicant to Brown just copied out the essay he'd written for all his other applications. Which had been typed into a programmable electric typewriter by his mom (you could hit a key and the essay would type itself onto the new sheet). I emphasize that he had written it himself, his mom just typed it for him.
"you're going to college and you need to know how to use a typewriter."
That's hilarious.
In 1999 I had a friend who wrote his PhD dissertation on a manual typewriter. Three times. Because his committee kept rejecting it. He finally dropped out without the degree.
8 - that doesn't surprise me all that much as conventional wisdom usually comes from somewhere. It's just that the comparison shouldn't be homeopathic treatment vs no treatment, it should be homeopathic treatment vs veterinary treatment.
my handwriting is infamously terrible, so I would be interested in what they would have to say about it.
8 - that doesn't surprise me all that much as conventional wisdom usually comes from somewhere. It's just that the comparison shouldn't be homeopathic treatment vs no treatment, it should be homeopathic treatment vs veterinary treatment.
no, you want to compare against no treatment. You can also compare against veteranary medicine, but you need the control. What they do need to do is see if the results are repeatable.