How should The Snaphot results be interpreted?

There is a lot that goes into reviewing and interpreting your Snapshot results. Each school will factor The Snapshot into their process a bit differently, and we have feedback from some of our schools in our Learning Center that describes how they do that.  

First, it is important to remember that The Snapshot is not intended to be used alone to make an admission decision. We also request that you discuss the use of The Snapshot in your admission process with inquiring families, as each school will use the results in their own way.

The Snapshot measures a student’s preferences, attitudes, and beliefs about their character. It does not measure their behavior. The Snapshot is meant to complement, not replace, other materials that are part of an application. The Snapshot results can help a school learn more about a student and the applicant group as a whole — from the student’s perspective. Using The Snapshot can aid in understanding if and how the programs you offer might best serve a student, based on the student's preferences. The Snapshot is not intended to be used to determine if a student should or should not be admitted. Alongside a complete application, The Snapshot is intended to offer context to help you better understand the whole student.

The Snapshot measures skills in two different ways. The first presents students with three statements and asks them to select the statement that is most like them and the statement that is least like them. In any given administration year there may be 20-30 of these item types. The second presents students with a number of scenarios and four different responses per scenario. Students are asked to rate the appropriateness of each response on a four-point scale from not appropriate to very appropriate. There are 10 scenarios total.

Each skill presented in a Snapshot report is described using one of three categories — emerging, developing, and demonstrating. The emerging category indicates that the student’s result fell into the lowest 25% of scores in the comparison sample; the developing category indicates that the student’s result fell into the middle 50% of scores in the comparison sample; and the demonstrating category indicates that the student’s result fell into the highest 25% of scores in the comparison sample. It is important to note that students with skills in the emerging category still have these skills, but maybe to a lesser degree than their peers. Similarly, students with skills in the demonstrating category still have room to develop these skills.

We have a video on How to Interpret Character Skills Snapshot  Results in the learning center as well as the Interpretive Guide to the Character Skills Snapshot, which you can download in PDF format from the Learning Center.