Around half of the 15,383 students seeking admission to Tufts this year chose to fill out a new optional application section designed to measure creativity, according to Dean of Admissions Lee Coffin.
There were seven questions in the section and each student that decided to complete it selected one.
Drawing a picture, imagining an alternative historical outcome if Rosa Parks had given up her seat on a bus in Montgomery in 1955 and creating a short story about the end of MTV were some of the choices available to students.
The overarching goal of the questions was to provide admissions officers with a way to pinpoint leadership abilities in applicants.
Dana Traub, a high school senior at the Hopkins School in Connecticut and Lauren Fine, a high school senior at the Winsor School in Boston, were accepted Early Decision to Tufts this year. Both of them filled out the optional section.
Traub said that she decided to answer one of the questions because she trusted the ability of the people at Tufts who created the questions to locate students with abilities that the university is looking for.
"I never considered not filling it out because they designed the questions and know what they're looking for," Traub said. She answered the sixth question, asking her to describe one of her "unsatisfied intellectual passions," and wrote about her inability to take classes on child development in high school.
Fine answered the question in which she was asked to talk about a time when she "took a risk and achieved an unexpected goal." She answered by describing a four-week bike trip that proved to be one of the most grueling experiences of her life.
"I didn't want it to sound like a typical 'climbing the mountain essay' so I tried to make it different by including vivid details from my experience," Fine said. "Since it was an optional essay, I felt that I had more freedom to express what I felt was most important about the experience."
The questions, which collectively comprise the Kaleidoscope Admissions Pilot, were drawn from research done at Yale by Dean of Arts and Sciences Robert Sternberg. Coffin was also involved in their creation.
Sternberg's goal in his research was to develop a new measure of testing for leadership and creativity potential apart from looking at SAT scores and high school GPAs.
Based on his theory of intelligence, students who have these skill are most likely to succeed, he said in an e-mail. "[In] school and life, you need creative skills to come up with new ideas, analytical skills to know if they are good ideas and practical skills to execute your ideas and persuade others of their value," he said.
Beyond leadership potential, Sternberg said that the questions can also predict academic success. His research has shown that employing new methods of evaluation have "doubled prediction of academic success in the freshman year," compared to just looking at SAT scores, he said.
Even when high school GPAs were added to the mix, including additional factors can lead to 50 percent increase in accuracy, he said.
These statistics come from a paper by Sternberg that was published in 2006. It reported research conducted while he was at Yale and reflected the results of analytical, creative and practical thinking tests. This research helped him to create the questions on the Tufts application.
Sternberg said he is satisfied with the number of students that filled out the optional essay portion, although he said that he did not have any specific numerical goal.
"I would have been satisfied with almost whatever results we got, because the goal is not to get a certain number of applicants to fill out the new section, but rather to give whatever applicants wish [to] a chance to show a broader range of strengths," he said.
Although many students fall into this category, there are an equal number who think that the section will not add to or will detract from their application.
When freshman Emily Brown, who was accepted Early Decision to the Class of 2010, applied to Tufts, the section was not on the application yet. But given the option, she said that she would not have filled it out.
"I'm just not a creative person, and I always have a lot of trouble with the kind of questions where you have to write a story or draw a picture. I don't think my answer would have been an accurate representation of myself," Brown said.
But according to Coffin, students were not punished for choosing not to answer. "I don't think writing one of the optional essays gives an applicant an 'advantage' but, like any element of the application that is well done, it does add another dimension to [a] student's competitiveness," Coffin wrote in an e-mail.
Sternberg agreed. "Students with great applications will get in anyway, regardless of whether they fill out the new section. Students with terrible applications won't get in, even if they do," he said. "Where the essays are designed to be helpful is in the large middle - where it is harder to distinguish among applicants," he said.
And for some students, the essays might have been enough to push them over the edge. The responses that Coffin has read so far were "very good," he said.
Although the responses have been helpful and Sternberg wants to keep them on the application in the future, he said that they will most likely never become a requirement.
According to Coffin, they will also continue to be a secondary consideration, behind academic performance. "Academic achievement remains the most important criteria in our selection process," he said.
