[brm]

They don't have to actively cultivate it but they should remove the walls between it. There's a lot of red tape/administrative confusion at most schools if you want to do anything interdisciplinary, especially if you want to cross more than two disciplines. Institutions should be more like buffets for the polymath. If I want to interlink say landscape architecture, sculpture, acoustics, materials science and biology I shouldn't need more than one signoff much less the 5 it would probably take to do work in something like that at most universities.

[numpy-thagoras]

The way to 'beat' the system's hard testing requirements is to make the interdisciplinary programs more involved, more quantitative, and just be more thorough and engaging, including soft skills elements.

I think the best outcome is to have such students crush their standardized tests by outperforming them due to having a higher baseline because of the interdisciplinary program's curriculum.