CMU School of Drama


Wednesday, July 11, 2007

New View of Admissions

Inside Higher Ed: "During the last year, Tufts University started a pilot project that represents one of the most significant shifts in undergraduate admissions policies for a competitive research university. The experiment involves additional essays used to identify applicants who are creative, who possess practical skills, or who have wisdom about how to promote the common good — characteristics Tufts says are consistent with its vision of higher education, but which may not be reflected in SAT scores or high school grade point averages."

3 comments:

Ethan Weil said...

I have been glad to hear more and more lately about more colleges moving to more complete admissions systems, replacing the largely ineffective standardized tests which I think do more harm to our education system than good.

Anonymous said...

This trend is great. Standardized testing is such BS. I hope more school get this idea in the future.

Anonymous said...

I think this is a really encouraging example of colleges adding a more nuanced and in depth look at students in admissions, especially since they didn't take anything away from their admissions process by the way. The Tufts experiment also illustrated that evaluating less "testable" qualities through essays not only does not have a negative effect on those admitted, but is also more objective than the prior system (since then admissions people would just make snap judgements about such qualities.)