The Prism Learner Profile

A 21st-century lens for identifying high-potential high school applicants, currently in development by Prism Assessments

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Admissions decisions hinge on potential – but it’s the hardest thing to see.

Traditional tools offer insights, but can’t tell the whole story:

Transcripts
Provide a detailed record of academic progress, but reflect past performance, not future potential. They emphasize content mastery over learning skills like adaptability, self-regulation, or metacognition.

Standardized Tests
Offer a snapshot of academic ability in specific subject areas, but do not reflect broader character strengths or even intellectual openness. Often correlate more with test prep access than with potential to learn and grow.

Recommendations
Add important context and perspective, yet can be highly subjective and variable in quality. Often shaped by relationship length, writing skill, or cultural context rather than consistent behavioral data – making comparisons difficult.

Essays
Can reveal voice and self-reflection, but are often heavily coached or edited. Style often overshadows substance, and schools struggle to evaluate them reliably across a broad applicant pool.

Interviews
Rich in insight – but time-intensive, hard to standardize, and vulnerable to unconscious bias or superficial performance.

So, how can potential be assessed – reliably, fairly, and at scale?

We distilled what schools actually care about, and what the research says, into two evidence-based domains:

Teachability

A student’s potential to grow and thrive in a rigorous, supportive educational environment.

High-teachability students convert feedback into academic gains, persist through rigor, excel in advanced courses, reduce remediation demands, and raise retention, graduation, and overall school achievement metrics.

The facets of Teachability are:

Growth Mindset: The belief that one's abilities can be developed through effort; viewing challenges and setbacks as opportunities for improvement

Intellectual Openness: The desire to seek understanding and explore ideas, while remaining aware of the limits of one's own knowledge and open to new or opposing perspectives

Self-Regulation: The ability to manage one's attention, emotions, and behavior in pursuit of learning goals

Meta-Learning: The ability to "learn about one's learning" – to plan, self-monitor, reflect, and adjust one's learning strategies over time

Adaptability: The ability to adjust one’s behavior to new conditions and handle change

Pro-Sociality

A student’s tendency to act in ways intended to benefit others, or society as a whole.

Pro-social students cultivate inclusive, respectful campuses, reducing disciplinary cases, elevating collaboration and teacher satisfaction, amplifying service impact and DEI goals, and forging strong alumni bonds that enrich long-term community and philanthropy.

The facets of Pro-Sociality are:

Integrity: Ethical reasoning in action – a student’s tendency to act honestly and uphold shared norms, even when it’s inconvenient or goes unseen

Compassion: Empathy in action – a student’s willingness to offer care, comfort, or support in response to others’ needs or distress

Perspective-Taking: Considering others’ experiences, viewpoints, and values, and using them to guide one’s communication, decisions, or problem-solving

The Prism Learner Profile turns these domains into observable evidence.

A multi-method assessment that elicits authentic student behaviors.

The Prism Learner Profile blends structured self-report, open-ended situational judgment tests, and live performance tasks to capture how students approach challenges, articulate their thinking, and demonstrate willingness to grow – not just how they are described on paper. It simulates the kinds of decisions, challenges, and interactions students encounter in real school environments.

The Discovery Sessions
(Core)

How do you fairly assess traits like curiosity, integrity, or adaptability? The Discovery Sessions apply trusted methods – the same kinds used in research and professional settings – to reveal students’ tendencies and understand how they approach complex situations. They’re taken online, asynchronously, guided by a student-friendly virtual proctor, with built-in protections to preserve test integrity and mitigate AI-related risks.

Session 1A:
Traits and Trade-Offs
(~20 min, online)

Students are presented with sets of statements and asked to select which are most and least like them. This forced-choice format helps surface relative strengths in key traits. Rather than rating themselves on fixed scales, students must make thoughtful trade-offs – revealing which values or behaviors they prioritize.

Session 1B:
Dilemmas and Decisions
(~40 min, online)

Students encounter realistic academic and social dilemmas, and are asked to think aloud about how they would navigate them. They begin by exploring different ways to approach the issue, and then justify the path they’d take.
Unlike many other situational judgement tests, these are open-ended and time-limited, requiring a spoken response that captures the student’s unrehearsed reasoning in real time. With no single “correct” answer, these scenarios highlight how students interpret, prioritize, and respond to complexity – offering a richer picture of character and decision-making.

The Learning Performance Sessions
(Optional Extension)

Some applicants call for an even closer look:

Priority candidates who show promise, but you need more evidence to feel confident
Students on the bubble, where deeper behavioral insight could clarify potential fit
International applicants, where English fluency and communication style may need better context

For these cases, the Learning Performance Sessions engages students in authentic tasks – live, under light pressure – that require them to think, communicate, reflect, and adapt. These sessions mirror a real learning arc: initial performance, formative feedback, time to process, and a chance to re-apply.

Delivered one-on-one by expert coaches trained in speech & debate and dialogic instruction, these sessions aren’t about polish or perfection. The goal is to observe how students respond when challenged – how they revise their thinking, incorporate feedback, and demonstrate readiness to grow. This is Teachability in action.

Session 2A:
Learning Performance Lab I
(~30 min, live online)

The student completes a short persuasive task [on a topic of their choice] – such as a mini-presentation or structured discussion – designed to surface reasoning, adaptability, and communication. Immediately afterward, they receive tailored coaching and feedback from the expert coach/facilitator. [complex communication; critical reasoning; metacognition]

Session 2B:
Learning Performance Lab II
(~30 min, live online)

What makes the Prism Learner Profile different?

Three ways the Prism Learner Profile redefines what admissions assessments can do:

1

A Methodology Built for Insight

We focus on Teachability and Pro-Sociality because these domains offer the clearest signals of student growth potential. Our multi-method, session-based design triangulates across tasks, sessions, and traits to surface meaningful patterns – with the flexibility for schools to go deeper where needed. It’s designed to be not just a snapshot of character, but a lens into actual behaviors.

2

A Student Experience That Feels Authentic

From the start, students interact with a virtual proctor through a chat-based interface and short video prompts – a more natural, conversational experience than a typical test form or static questionnaire. It’s designed to feel approachable, engaging, and less anxiety-inducing. Session 2 then builds on this with a live, one-on-one teaching interaction that mirrors the arc of real classroom learning. By grounding both sessions in realistic, student-centered formats, the Prism Learner Profile elicits more authentic responses – giving schools a clearer picture of how students actually think, communicate, and adapt in environments much like the ones they’ll be entering.

3

A Highly Actionable Report as a Lens into Potential

Over and above broad individual scores for Teachability and Pro-Sociality, the Prism Learner Profile report offers something most assessments don’t: high-fidelity, qualitative insight into the student. Trained human assessors lead the scoring process to ensure contextual accuracy, fairness, and sound judgment, while a carefully calibrated proprietary AI model supports by weaving together insights from across sessions. The result is a rich, developmental profile that highlights relative strengths, flags areas for support, and can even be tailored to reflect your school’s values – giving admissions teams the clarity and context to make more informed, mission-aligned decisions.

Being designed for – and with – admissions teams.

Created to complement your judgment, support your admissions goals, and strengthen your process.

The Prism Learner Profile is being designed to support admissions teams at every stage of the process – from early screening through to final committee review. While it is still in the development phase, its core purpose is clear: to surface meaningful, diagnostic insights that spark meaningful dialogue about a student’s potential to excel.

Whether you're seeking to streamline your pipeline, increase yield, improve fit, or better reflect your school’s priorities – the Prism Learner Profile is being built to help you do just that.

What schools can expect:

A structured view of each student’s Teachability and Pro-Sociality, anchored in authentic evidence

Narrative observations that reveal how traits like adaptability, intellectual openness, and perspective-taking show up in practice

Patterns across multiple methods that help validate strengths and flag areas for support

The ability to align insights with your school’s mission, graduate profile, or values

Insights to enrich interviews, inform onboarding, and reduce guesswork – not just at the margins, but where it matters most