I'm not sure in what way having an objective way to measure someone's effectiveness-at-learning independently of cultural standards (IE clan nin being generally more talented, or whatever) WOULDN'T make it easier to find a competent-but-overlooked apprentice.
This can be done without having to spend spoons on a way to figure out the Magic Numbers in character.
E: And by that I mean we don't need to wait for the Chakra Grant thingy to do it.
Sith Mastering 101: Leaf Academy Edition
1)Acquiring your candidate pool:
- Throw out everything the academy thinks they know about teaching and assessing students.
- They clearly don't know that much.
- Spend a week or two observing some ten year olds in person. Pitch this as "Taijutsu Training Week." or something cute to get the kids hyped.
- See how long it takes them to level up in Taijutsu on average.
- Or Athletics. Or Alertness. Or Deceit. All are useful for a ninja.
- Select the top 20% of kids or until you have about a dozen.
- While doing this, pose them some other tests to assess general creativity and cleverness.
- Take note of these students as well. Add them to the pool.
- A clever battle plan is always worth its weight in XP/day.
- Make special note of any students who are particularly hungry , resource deprived and in need of good fortune. Who are also above average in learning speed.
- The orphans, the Nakano's who go home to a family of 9 starving civilians, the clanless schmucks with an axe to grind, what have you.
- Now after you have done your own assessments, use any academy assessment data to inform you as a secondary opinion. Use instructor opinion as a tertiary opinion, but keep in mind these people are idiots. Disregard any poor scores in areas like "History" or "Math" because ultimately these can be taught and do not reflect the true quality of a prospective ninja.
- Keep in mind potential institutional biases towards: females, clanless, minor clans, jinchuuriki, Inuzaka, individuals with Lightning country ancestry, etc.
- Repeat with eleven year olds or nine year olds if you literally don't have anyone. Shouldn't have to do this.
2) Weed out the weaklings and fools
You should have about a dozen candidates at least. You should aim to narrow it down to ~6 actual apprentices.
- Anyone not willing to commit actual time (after school to dusk at a minimum) is out.
- Anyone not willing to persevere through a little adversity is out.
- Anyone who doesn't want to use their head: out.
- Anyone who has no discipline and isn't willing to follow orders: out,out,out!
The standard Navy Seal hell week modified to take place after school, interspersed with a battery of tests with semi-obvious loopholes and designed with clever exploits in mind, will accomplish this. To name a few examples: anything Kagome tried with Honoka, probably a thousand variants on the canon bell test, Mulan grabbing the arrow from that wooden pillar, and a couple dozen examples from other various pieces of fiction I don't feel like naming explicitly (Stuff written by Sanderson, Butcher, etc.).
3) Corrupt the younglings
- Run kids through basic philosophical reconditioning.
- Uplift Uplift, Will of Fire, Uplift Uplift yadda yadda
- Spout some other cool sounding zen shit that sounds very insightful.
- Pedagogical Note: Whenever someone does this, they are almost entirely talking out of their ass. It's considered bad practice to call them out on it though.
- Run through basic tactics and strategy
- A decent amount of problem solving techniques. "Think for five minutes before etc etc."
- Outside the box thinking.
- Break the box thinking.
4) Teach them how to cackle maniacally and shoot lightning from their fingertips
- Start parceling out nuggets of Deep Shinobi Lore in interesting and not to be forgotten ways.
- Rule 0: NotParanoidEnough.mp4
- Rule 1: Explosives and Storage Seals solve all problems.
- AKA Kagome's First Maxim.
- Rule 2: Ninja cheat.
- AKA Kagome's Second Maxim.
- Rule 3: Become a sealmaster. It is the sensible thing to do.
- Rule 4: Something something efficient utilization of resources => Victory
- Introduce them to the rest of Hazou's List of Shinobi Specifications
- (Authors Note: Have mental draft. To be written up.)
- Improve their resource base if they are sorely lacking in resources.
- Don't let Yusuke and his parents go hungry every other day, that's a poor learning environment.
- Take out on some till-n-fills for more
indoctrination mission experience pre-graduation.
5) Take over the galaxy
@Cariyaga obviously if we could objectively measure (Change in CR LVL)/(TIME) we can just have the academy instructor schmucks do that to measure everyone's talent rate, but experience lends me to believe that the team will be Jonin by the time we are able to get the funding and personnel for the Chakra Qunatification Project, see it and other experiments through to completion to the extent its accepted as scientific fact by the Leaf mednin/science specs,
and reform the academy to the point where they implement this in a meaningful way.
(Project Grant + Project Completion + Peer Review + Implementation in a School System ? Ugh. If this takes three years in character from start to finish it'll be an absolute miracle, military dictatorship being accounted for.)
E: It's also good to keep in mind that the "Talent Coefficient" thing is just a thingy that models XP/day on average. It doesn't necessarily need to be consistent on a day to day basis or over a small time period like a week or so.
