Tufts gets creative on admissions

The Boston Globe reports:

A majority of the 15,000 young people who apply to Tufts University each year look impeccable on paper: good grades and test scores, plenty of extracurricular activities.


But there's only room to admit a quarter of them, so who deserves to make the cut?

In choosing among its most promising applicants, Tufts and other selective colleges have leaned heavily on subjective judgments -- based on interviews, essays, and recommendations -- to pick the applicants they believe will do the best in the classroom and later in life.

This fall, Tufts will try a more scientific approach to its toughest decisions, using its application to measure aspects of intelligence that cannot be approximated by SAT scores. A top Tufts dean believes that creativity and practical skills -- the ability to implement ideas and win other people's backing -- are just as important as the analytical skills typically measured by standardized tests.

The university will ask applicants to show original thinking and imagine, for example, an alternative version of history: What if civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks had given up her seat on the bus? Or, they could be asked to write an off-the-wall ministory with the title, ``My roommate is a space alien."

Sounds like Tufts wants to get a rigged outcome of more "politically correct" groups into the school.