The Tufts Plan:
Admission process seeks evidence of leadership skills

Lee Coffin, dean of undergraduate admission at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, tested the secondary school admission world at Milton. He was dean of admission at Milton from 2001 to 2003. Lee takes mission statements seriously. To the extent that a school’s mission is alive in that school’s culture and priorities, the mission guides the admission decisions: Who would thrive in this environment? In turn, the students who enroll ultimately strengthen the mission. A pilot program that will be filtered into Tufts’ standard admission process aims to improve the chances of maximizing that two-way dynamic.

President Lawrence Bacow expresses Tufts’ mission as forging a community that uses intellect to make a difference in the world. “We celebrate the ideals of citizenship and activism,” Lee explains. “We want to create new leaders for a changing world. Assertive-ness, flexibility, inquisitiveness, creativity, passion and leadership are qualities we seek.”

Tufts reviewed 15,291 applications last year to build a class of 1,275. Roughly 75 percent of the applicants, Lee says, are “qualified. They could perform successfully in a writing-intensive, discussion-oriented Tufts classroom.” How do admission officers find the potential “new leaders” among those applicants?

The Common Application has fueled more than 10 years of record numbers applying to Tufts and colleges like it, but the Common Application yields fairly generic information about students. Like many schools, Tufts has added required supplemental essays to offer insight about applicants that also “reflect what we value as an institution,” says Lee.

“You’d be surprised how much we’ve learned about students just through their answers to the first question (Describe the environment in which you were raised—your family, home, neighborhood or community—and how it influenced the person you are today.),” he says. “We’ve learned about dinner-table conversation, being raised by a single mom, coming out—as an adopted child—to parents and family: amazing insights and expressive writing based on seemingly innocuous life events. ‘The things I’m interested in are not part of the curriculum,’ one boy wrote. ‘Through my own exploration I learned that my heritage wasn’t boring. My love of ancestry was a launching point for understanding all kinds of differences in history, art, and literature.’ Our supplemental essays give people a chance to talk about their intellectual passion. These essays have already prompted different conversations among admission officers, but they’re not enough to get at what we’d like to know.”

Lee hopes Robert Sternberg’s work will reach further toward understanding a student’s capabilities. Formerly a professor of psychology and education at Yale, Robert Sternberg is now dean of Tufts School of Arts and Sciences. As Sam Allis, writing in the Boston Globe, summarized, “Sternberg… has made a career out of plumbing the depths of leadership, intelligence, creativity and wisdom.”

Rather than refute the need for standardized tests, Dean Sternberg simply says that they are too narrow. According to the journal Inside Higher Ed, “Sternberg rejected the notion that the SAT doesn’t add anything to the admission process. But he said that the SAT tends to have the most predictive ability for those from wealthier parts of society. By broadening the measures looked at, he said, colleges can have better predictive tools for all students.”

Dean Sternberg refers to measures he developed while at Yale. He describes them as “new assessment tools to supplement the horrid admission process,” according to the Boston Globe, which also reported that Sternberg’s assessment tools “were introduced at about 1,000 colleges and the results, to be published soon in the journal Intelligence, were bracing. These tools significantly flattened the performance differences among whites and minorities and improved the prediction of freshman performance.”

Dean Sternberg’s concept of successful intelligence, or leadership, involves three areas, Lee explains. “The first is creativity (having new or original ideas); the second is analytical skills (making good assessments of those ideas); and the third is practical skills (the ability to implement the ideas or to make things happen). The complement of all three is wisdom.”

Writing on his Web site, Dean Sternberg describes wisdom: “according to which a wise person is one who uses his or her successful intelligence in order to seek a common good, by balancing intrapersonal, interpersonal, and extrapersonal interests; over the short and long terms; through the infusion of values; in order to adapt to, shape, and select environments.”

Acknowledging the synergy between Dean Sternberg’s research and Lee Coffin’s goals, the two joined forces to create a system that would more adequately reveal attributes of successful intelligence among applicants, and to include that system in the admission process.

How will it work? Tufts will launch a pilot program in the 2007 admission season, although it won’t apply to all applicants in the initial year. Tufts, like most colleges and universities, evaluates each applicant in three areas: academic achievement; extracurricular activities and talent; and personal qualities. At Tufts, admission officers use a scale of 1 to 7 to rate these attributes; a score of 1 represents outstanding achievement. The evaluation for academic achievement is the most important element and represents the “first cut.” Applicants with scores higher than 5, approximately a quarter of the applicant pool, are out of the running. At the other end of the range, applicants in the top two ratings represent the top 20–25 percent of Tufts’ applicant pool. In the middle of these two groups sit the “3s” and “4s,” academically “qualified” candidates who constitute the broad, talented middle of Tufts’ pool. Last year, nearly 8,000 of the 15,291 applicants fell into this band. Lee hopes the Rainbow Project—the pilot system to assess for the successful intelligence—will help sort this qualified middle more effectively. “At a place like Tufts, where the overall acceptance rate is usually 25–28 percent,” Lee notes, “the admission process is inherently subjective. We hope the Rainbow measurements will offer additional, quantifiable indices to measure the ‘intangibles’ that populate our work.”

Students will be offered seven optional essays that have been designed to get at evidence of analytical, creative and practical skills; wisdom will also be probed. [To review the essays, see the sidebar on this page.] In addition, Lee plans other written exercises in a more traditional testing setting, some that are timed or prompted by videos. “[The students] could watch a film about a situation they might face in college—such as going to a professor to ask for a recommendation only to realize that the professor doesn’t know you—and write a short piece about that,” according to Inside Higher Ed (July 2006). Inside Higher Ed reports that for these parts of the Rainbow Project, “Tufts will hold sessions for 150 applicants during a weekend that is part of the university’s efforts to recruit minority students.”

Using the Sternberg scale to grade the essays or the timed exercise, Tufts will introduce additional admissions evaluations. What impact will this grading have as admission officers try to make decisions? “We will admit approximately 2,000 students from this middle band of 8,000,” Lee says. Imagine, for instance, that 10 have earned a “distinguished” level of creativity. That’s a relevant additional data point. That would prompt a different conversation. We had one essay from a person who grew up in a household and community as a member of a completely underrepresented political group. He talked about how he learned how to listen, how he went about getting things done. He demonstrated a high level of practical ability. If, as a nation, we’re trying to foster civil political discourse between people with opposing viewpoints, why wouldn’t we admit this student?

“Does being student body president,” Lee said to Inside Higher Ed, “really mean something, or was it just a popularity contest?…The Rainbow Project approach provides ways, in theory, to see how students respond to situations and how creative they can be in situations they haven’t been rehearsing at SAT camp for the last five summers. With a scientific basis to evaluating creativity and leadership, admissions officers are likely to put more weight on such qualities.”

In the interests of identifying students who will energetically fulfill the mission of the school, Tufts is trying something new. It’s a low-risk experiment, with high potential outcomes: for the college, for students and, ultimately—if use of these assessment tools becomes widespread—for the quality of high school education.

Cathleen Everett

 

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