We have established a large dataset of application packages from various colleges and universities. To assess character strengths of applicants, we are developing computational metrics using semantic distance methods and large language models (LLMs) to analyze different forms of personal writing. Our team works collaboratively to identify key character strengths including creativity, curiosity, open-mindedness, love of learning, persistence, kindness, citizenship, self-regulation, hope, and spirituality/purpose.

The research follows students longitudinally from their final semester of college through their early post-college lives to measure character strengths in greater depth and explore a broad range of flourishing-related outcomes.

Our computational metric showed a strong correlation with human experts' creativity ratings of admissions essays. Applicants who wrote more creative essays, as evaluated by our metric, achieved higher GPAs in college and had lower rates of D, F, or withdrawal, even after accounting for standardized test scores. Notably, our creativity metric was much less associated with sociodemographic factors, such as race and ethnicity, compared to standardized test scores. We replicated our findings using data from four universities with varying characteristics, ensuring the robustness of our results. We plan to expand our research to explore the value of creativity and other character strengths in the context of the increasing use of generative AI.