Testimonials

Finally. Someone realised that certain testimonials are written by students themselves and vetted by their teachers. How they took so long to acknowledge this is beyond me. Certain institutions remained insistent that testimonials are wholly written by their teachers.

For one thing, how can a teacher remember so much details of each and every students. A typical class has at least 25 students. Each student takes at least 4 subjects and has at least 1 CCA. How can a teacher remembers what every and each student did? A teacher has other classes to teach as well.

There is nothing wrong with students writing testimonials for themselves, provided there are processes for verifying the accuracy of their work. If teachers are forced to write testimonials, I believe the typical strategy will be to trawl the school's database, find out achievements and then write these in, along with some generic phrases that inevitably put all students in a good light. What is the difference then? If you recall your student life, a teacher typically gets along more frequently with a handful of students. Testimonials for these students would be more accurate. As for the rest....

If you totally believe the accuracy of testimonials, then I believe you are shortchanging yourself. Just look at all those testimonials for commercial products. Do you really believe them? Perhaps some are true. But if testimonials are really so accurate, why do companies bother to conduct costly human clinical trials and why bosses need to conduct interviews? Testimonials probably reflect the capability of the person accurately. But subtle traits such as their characters, their ability to communicate with others, to work with others for examples, do not get a proper airing. It is easy to "pretend" in front of bosses. After all, they do not stand behind you to observe you the entire day. Further more, schools rarely carry out peer appraisals for students.

Just like those short term toxicity tests, interviews are short term tests, providing some information on candidates, but not the complete picture. With lessons that coaches interview skills, it is even more difficult to discern true behaviours from "prepared responses".

However, given the lack of suitable mode of assessing candidates besides interviews and testimonials, we have to live with them for now. Then again, it is likely that neither offers an entirely accurate picture of a candidate. Interviews fare slightly better because you can further question the candidates to reveal their true (or "true-er") nature,