Maybe the key trait isn’t conformity (which is easy to test in an interview), but reliability (which is impossible to test in a short time). And people aren’t very reliable by nature; it seems to me that school makes many people better at not flaking, not just helps them signal non-flakeyness. That would also partly explain the sheepskin effect, because anyone who studied 3.9 years instead of 4 is clearly flakey.
All good points.
Maybe the key trait isn’t conformity (which is easy to test in an interview), but reliability (which is impossible to test in a short time). And people aren’t very reliable by nature; it seems to me that school makes many people better at not flaking, not just helps them signal non-flakeyness. That would also partly explain the sheepskin effect, because anyone who studied 3.9 years instead of 4 is clearly flakey.