Admission criteria to the Connecticut Alternate Route to Teacher Certification: The effect of interviews on candidate ratings

The Connecticut Alternate Route to Certification program is a teacher certification program for mid-career professionals who want to become public school teachers. The program has a limited enrollment and cannot accept all qualified applicants, and therefore all candidate applications that meet minimum criteria are rated (and then ranked) for admission priority. Candidates are rated on the following submissions: essay, letters of recommendation, grade point average and undergraduate transcript, breadth and quality of work/life experience, and breadth and quality of experience with young people. Given that some qualified candidates are not admitted to the program, it was hypothesized that interviews with candidates would enable the program to better select the highest quality candidates, thus supporting high program and teacher quality. A cohort of candidates was rated by the existing process and separately by interviews. These ratings were correlated with each other and with a post-program evaluation of the candidates by the program instructors. The interviews were a better predictor of candidate performance than the established process.