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The Great College Admissions Riddle
September/October 2010
Reviewed by Geoff Kabaservice ’88, ’99PhD
Geoff Kabaservice ’88, ’99PhD, is the author of The
Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal
Establishment.
College Admissions for the 21st Century
by Robert J. Sternberg '72
Harvard University Press, $23.95
Robert J. Sternberg '72 flunked his first-grade IQ
test and therefore, in the views of his elementary school teachers, was
destined for a life of failure. Then, miraculously, one fourth-grade teacher
chose to look beyond the test’s verdict and tell young Sternberg that he might
yet make something of himself. Thereafter he became a straight-A student,
graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Yale, and served a stint in
Yale’s admissions office. He has dedicated his distinguished career as a
psychology professor and academic administrator to attacking the limited view
of human potential inherent in the IQ test that wrote him off at an early age.
Payback is sweet.
Now Sternberg has written a book that will cheer up
anyone who has ever felt that standardized tests like the SAT failed to convey
their multidimensional abilities and unique human worth, which is to say nearly
everyone who has ever taken such a test. Drawing on a wide body of research
into human intelligence, he argues that the century-old SAT is at best a rigid
and partial measurement of a college applicant’s analytic skills and ability to
memorize and regurgitate large chunks of information, but does not assess other
qualities that are equally important to college and life success. These
"hidden" talents include creative abilities, practical savvy, and wisdom (by
which Sternberg means community-oriented ethical judgment). He claims that
other elements of the college admissions process typically overlook these
critical qualities.
Unlike many critics of testing, Sternberg thinks that
it’s possible to build a better mousetrap. As a professor at Yale, Sternberg
helped create a battery of tests that assessed high school students'
analytical, practical, and creative skills. The practical skills section included
a movie scenario of a problem that might confront college students, such as
finding that a professor you’ve asked for a letter of recommendation doesn’t
appear to remember you; test-takers had to explain how they would respond. The
creative skills section required students to solve math problems with novel
premises, write a short story on an unusual theme such as "The Octopus’s Sneakers,"
and tell stories based on picture collages. The test results offered a
substantially improved prediction of students' first-year college grades than
that provided by the SAT and GPA, while also narrowing the performance gap
between whites and "historically disadvantaged groups" such as African
Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans.
When he was dean of arts and sciences at Tufts
University, from 2005 until earlier this year, Sternberg saw an opportunity to
make Tufts "the national leader in enlightened admissions policies," as he told
the Tufts Daily.
If he had found some way of getting applicants to take the test Yale devised,
bettering Tufts’s ability to select the students most likely to excel while
minimizing affirmative action, he might have achieved his aim. Unfortunately,
if Tufts or any other university were to require applicants to subject
themselves to an additional two to four hours of mental poking and prodding
beyond the SAT, the number of high school seniors applying for admission would
drop substantially. That drop in numerical selectivity would have a negative
impact on the institution’s reputational ranking and even its Moody’s credit
rating.
Instead, Tufts now offers applicants the option of
writing a short response to one of several questions intended to measure
creativity, practicality, or wisdom. An applicant might write a short story on
"The End of MTV," or assess whether Kermit the Frog was correct to lament the
uneasiness of being green. Applicants also have the opportunity to produce a
short video that conveys something of who they are. The additional information
undoubtedly is helpful to admissions officers, but it’s unlikely that Tufts has
significantly changed the admissions process.
Sternberg does an excellent job of laying out the
dilemmas that confront the admissions departments of selective universities, a
category that now includes many more institutions than it would have even 10 or
20 years ago. He is evenhanded in explaining the shortcomings of the
traditional admissions process and the reasons why, even with their flaws, such
elements as the SAT, geographic preferences, and athletic considerations ought
to be retained. "In admissions, ideals are continually bumping into reality,"
he notes, "and the chosen solution often is not perfectly principled but ultimately
is made for pragmatic reasons.”
But Sternberg is hardly the first to traverse the
bloody ground of college admissions debates, and his insights are not as new as
he seems to assume. Arthur Howe Jr. '43, Yale’s dean of admissions from 1956 to
1964, experimented with tests to assess applicants' creativity. In the 1970s,
Worth David '56 allowed Yale applicants to submit nontraditional evidence of
their abilities and interests, evidence that ranged from hand-forged chain mail
to freshly baked cakes. The SAT was not historically the tool of upper-class
domination that Sternberg claims, but rather provided the means of opening the
top universities to students who were not affluent WASP males. The most
selective institutions might not assign numerical values to applicants'
creativity, practicality, and ethical judgment, but they have been actively
seeking out these qualities for many decades.
Sternberg contends that the college admissions
process is not working well, in that many of those students who were not
admitted to the selective colleges would do better academically than the ones
who were. Personally, I doubt that the Insanely Selective Institutions—the
places like Yale that reject more than 90 percent of their applicants—are
admitting many underperformers. The major problem the ISIs face is their
astonishing lack of class diversity. When fewer than 15 percent of Yale
undergraduates come from families that earn less than $60,000 a year, $8,000
more than the national median income, there’s a serious danger that the country
someday will end up with a closed and self-perpetuating leadership caste, even
if it’s a multiethnic and multiracial caste.
The tests Sternberg and his colleagues devised at
Yale might be useful in identifying potential applicants who appear to be both
economically and competitively disadvantaged by the current admissions process.
It’s possible that a consortium of institutions might administer such tests in
impoverished rural and urban areas to turn up talented individuals who might
not otherwise think of applying to selective universities, or perhaps any
university at all.
Sternberg doesn’t ask whether more and better testing
will fundamentally improve an admissions system that devotes less and less
personalized attention to individual applicants as the overall numbers grow.
What he does recognize is that many universities claim to admit applicants on
the basis of their leadership potential, but don’t do much to select for or
develop those qualities in their students. His book is a provocative
contribution to the coming debate over the real worth of college education, one
that could be even more controversial than the current debate over admissions. 
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