COLLEGE: A Universal Tool to Assess Indonesian Student’s Soft Skills

Abstract

Soft skills make significant contributions to university graduates' success, especially when they are in the work field. However, it is not easy to access an instrument to measure Indonesian students' soft skills. This article is aimed to promote COLLEGE, a valid, reliable, specific, and universal instrument that can be used to assess and interpret students' soft skills. COLLEGE is the acronym of soft skills: Communication skills, Organizational skills, Leadership, Logic, Effort, Group skills, and ethics. The development of the instrument refers to Mardapi's model consisting following steps: preliminary research, early product analysis and development, expert validation and revision of the product, small-scale field trials and revision, large-scale field trials and final product, and assessing and interpreting. The researcher applies expert judgment to validate the instrument. ITEMAN version 3.0 is used to select the items and Alpha Cronbach coefficient with SPSS Version 16.0 to measure the instrument's reliability. This instrument has 66 items in Likert Scale format and has been applied to assess 413 Indonesian university students from various faculties with four criteria: very good, good, low, and very low.