The psychologist Richard Nisbett calls this the “interview illusion”: our certainty that we’re learning more in an interview than we really are. He points out that, in grad-school admissions, interviews are often taken as seriously as GPA. The absurdity, he says, is that “you and I, looking at a folder or interviewing someone for a half hour, are supposed to be able to form a better impression than one based on three-and-a-half years of the cumulative evaluation of 20 to 40 different professors.”
