Dalhousie University’s MBA Program adopts Casper to implement holistic admissions

June 28, 2023

Acuity Insights’ Casper soft skills assessment will be used to measure candidates’ personal and professional skills when applying to Faculty of Management’s MBA Program.

TORONTO, June 28, 2023 — Acuity Insights announces that Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Management’s MBA Program will implement a new, holistic, and fairer admissions process by adding the Casper assessment to admissions requirements for the program. Casper will provide a view of the non-academic skills of applicants, in addition to the academic skills through traditional measures, enabling the school to consider the ‘whole’ applicant.

The program made the decision to incorporate Casper into its admissions process after conducting a pilot study in 2021, which showed that for every one point increase in a student’s Casper score, that student was 79% more likely to receive a higher Employee Evaluation score in their 8-month corporate residency.

Accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), the MBA program welcomes students from all undergraduate disciplines and does not require any previous relevant work experience. Instead, the program focuses on providing its graduate students with an immersive 8-month experiential learning opportunity, with paid work experience with employer partners in many major cities across Canada.

Starting in Fall of 2023, the Corporate Residency MBA Program will use Casper as part of its admissions process – alongside other measures, which include GPA, official transcripts, a resume, a letter of intent and academic letters of reference to evaluate applicants for the program.

In an effort to incorporate a more well-rounded view of applicants, candidates will no longer be required to submit GMAT or GRE scores for admissions to the program.

Dan Shaw, Director of MBA programs at Dalhousie University says, “We are extremely pleased with the results of our pilot study with Acuity Insights, which clearly demonstrated a strong link between Casper and success within their 8-month corporate residency. We are very pleased to incorporate this key measure for soft skills, which we believe are critical to success, not just in our Dalhousie MBA program, but also for the future careers of our graduates.”

Rich Emrich, CEO and Co-founder of Acuity Insights says, “We are thrilled to be partnering with Dalhousie University’s MBA program, and look forward to watching the program continue to flourish and develop the next generation of change-makers in the world of business. Through our ongoing conversations, and recent pilot study, we have already seen how Casper can be the next step in bringing in exceptional candidates into the program. It’s clear the Dalhousie MBA Program is committed to providing a fair and holistic admissions opportunity for all students, and Casper will help to facilitate their goal.”

About Casper soft skills assessment

The Casper assessment tool measures soft skills such as:

• Adaptability
• Communication
• Collaboration
• Empathy
• Professionalism
• Teamwork

The evidence-based assessment is backed by two decades of research, and is used by over 500 program partners worldwide in various industries, from medical education, teacher’s education, and business education.

Casper assesses how individuals would handle personal and professional challenges and, more importantly, their underlying reasoning. By using an open-response format, it promotes authenticity by allowing applicants to describe their actions and provide the rationale behind their decisions in specific scenarios. Casper presents real-world situations, eliminating the need for prior knowledge of a particular profession. The test includes both text and video-based scenarios and responses that reflect real-life experiences, encouraging participants to freely express their thoughts.

Additionally, Casper offers the following advantages to the admissions process:

1. High acceptance from both programs and applicants.
2. Reduced demographic disparities compared to other admissions assessments.
3. Time-saving, as Casper provides a single ‘z’ score for each applicant.
4. Evaluation by well-trained “raters” who are representative of the community that future students will serve.
5. Easy integration into existing admissions processes.
6. Predictive capability for program performance.
7. Decreased need for student remediation, leading to lower instances and costs.
8. Ongoing research support and opportunities with our higher education partners

Visit our website to discover how Casper can support your business admissions goals.

About Acuity Insights

Acuity Insights is the leading provider of admissions assessment, program management, and analytics solutions for higher education. The company’s solutions help higher education institutions deliver on their mission holistically, considering the whole student, widening pathways into higher education, and ensuring both student and program success. Recognized as one of Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 companies for 2021 and 2022, Acuity’s solutions are used by nearly 600 higher education programs worldwide. Its Casper situational judgment test (SJT), taken by more than 150,000 applicants every year, is the most widely used open-response SJT in higher education and is backed by almost 20 years of efficacy research. For more information, visit acuityinsights.com.

Media contact:
Brianna Bell, Content & Communications Manager
bbell@acuityinsights.com