More creative questions on apps?

[greenwitch]

<p>From today’s Washington Post, some evidence for the validity of all those short answer questions on college apps:</p>

<p>[To</a> get the real star students, college admissions should look beyond SATs](<a href=“http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/19/AR2010111902997.html]To”>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/19/AR2010111902997.html)</p>

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In the early 2000s, when I was still a Yale professor, I collaborated with teachers and researchers at two high schools and 13 colleges and universities of varying selectivity on a study we called the Rainbow Project. Our goal was to determine whether including a mix of creative, analytical and practical questions on a college admissions test might have positive effects on the admissions process. We found that it did: Incorporating the results of our tests made predictions of freshman grade-point average twice as accurate as those based on the SAT alone, and 50 percent better than those based on SATs and high school grades combined. We also found that differences between ethnic groups were substantially smaller on our questions than on the SAT.

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This system has been in place for five years, with about two-thirds of Tufts’s roughly 15,500 annual applicants choosing to answer one of the optional questions. My collaborators and I have just published a study in the journal College and University looking at the results. Among our key findings: After controlling for high school grades and SATs, Tufts’s new admissions questions, like those posed by the Rainbow Project before them, improved prediction of college grades. They also helped forecast which students would shine as active citizens and leaders on campus, and they virtually eliminated the admissions edge enjoyed by some ethnic groups.

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The approach we tried at Tufts is one that any college can adopt by merely adding a few questions to its application. But some schools, in their rush to improve their U.S. News & World Report rankings, are moving in the opposite direction. They are stripping their applications to the bare bones, removing essays and other components that provide insight into a student’s character and talents, so as to make their applications easier to fill out. They hope to thereby increase application numbers, and thus rejection rates and the appearance of “selectivity.” But they should ask themselves how, exactly, this approach makes their schools any better.</p>

<p>It certainly doesn’t make the world better. Many of the major messes confronting us today - in corporate boardrooms and on Wall Street, in politics and even in churches - have been created by people who tested very well and earned high grades at prestigious institutions. They are smart, but foolish. The world might improve if we deliberately and systematically selected students not only for their knowledge and analytical skills, but also for their creative and practical skills - and their wisdom.

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