Personal Statement, Meet Entrance Exam

At so-called first tier colleges, grades or test scores aren’t enough to distinguish students; awards, activities, recommendations, and essays decide which candidates will be admitted instead. Those metrics aren’t the most reliable. Essays, in particular, are often more of a function of how much time a student puts into them and how much help they have. And that’s part of the reason college admissions officers have said not infrequently that essays are the deciding factor for only a tiny fraction of applicants.

A better way to glean insight into applicants might be to have them finish their essays in a given time, at an administration of a standard “personal statement” exam. Give them an hour or two, some number two pencils, and a new essay prompt every year. Not one of the standard ones (“describe a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken…”) but something that better showcases the way a student thinks. For instance, the University of Chicago used the following (abridged) prompt from 2006:

People often think of language as a connector…we, however, are interested in how language sets people apart. Start with the peculiarities of your own personal language-the voice you use when speaking most intimately to yourself, the vocabulary that spills out when you’re startled, or special phrases and gestures that no one else seems to use or even understand – and tell us how your language makes you unique.

Let’s say a student received that prompt at the administration of an annual exam, and had to finish it in an hour. Once finished, their essay would be stored in an online system like the Common Application, and sent off to all the colleges they had applied to. Admissions officers would read it along with all the other materials in their application files.

Implications

I venture to say that this system would favor students who are intellectual, mature, and introspective, who should be getting into good colleges. After all, good writing and thinking skills are nearly difficult to simulate; a student can have their essays written or planned by someone else, but not when the topic is something like super-huge mustard (another UChicago relic). The alternative is simply to learn how to write a good essay. In the teacher’s trinity of “I do”, “we do”, and “you do”, changing to this system would shift the college applications dynamic from the first two to the third.

Could students prepare for this “exam”? Of course, and they will. But their preparation would be the kind of studying that is beneficial. Being able to concisely describe oneself in a page in an hour is a valuable skill, polishing a high schooler’s personal statement less so.

Admittedly, reducing the timeframe for writing essays to an hour would exacerbate an element of randomness. Yes, failing to complete a good essay on the test could hurt a student’s chances of succeeding – but overall, it would still reward students with real achievements and ideas to write about. (Don’t have any? Well, you’ll be fine, since you probably won’t be alone.) Remember that any essay written in a hour will be flawed in some way.

And it’s an improvement over writing essays on one’s own time. While the current system creates systematic error, this system would introduce random error – at the very least, it would reduce the unfairness of college counseling and essay mills. Confounding variables for this “exam” would be more like writing skill, a tangible skill and something that could be compensated for by examining SAT essays, activities, and recommendations.

As long as admissions counselors treat the essay as a way to gain insight into students’ personalities, rather than a way for students to showcase their accomplishments. For instance, I can imagine trying to fit a generic essay on a sports injury or a research experience for this 2004 University of Chicago prompt – and utterly failing:

If you could balance on a tightrope, over what landscape would you walk? (No net.)

This is the perfect kind of prompt for which it would be good to have an idea of what to write about. But, at the same time, it’s not the kind of prompt that can be prepared for on its own.

Feasibility

Of course, timed essays have their problems. In terms of feasibility, they lie somewhere in between the extremes of effort and complexity. On one end is the application and interview system in use now; on the other is something like Olin College’s Candidates’ Weekend, an event in which students are selected based on their own work each other and with admissions officers.

But timed essays don’t have to replace untimed ones. Colleges should still give applicants a chance to research them and explain why they want to go there, for instance.

There’s also the problem of writing prompts. But when only a few need to be used every year – as long as they’re administered at exactly the same time across the nation – the problem seems manageable given all the talent that can be dedicated to it. The University of Chicago alone manages to put out a consistent flow of prompts. And even picking from the prompts currently available would level the college-application playing field a little.

Plus, there are other games that can be played with the prompts. Imagine one like this:

Albert Einstein once said, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” Propose your own original theory to explain one of the 16 mysteries below. Your theory does not need to be testable or even probable; however, it should provide some laws, principles, and/ or causes to explain the facts, phenomena, or existence of one of these mysteries. You can make your theory artistic, scientific, conspiracy-driven, quantum, fanciful, or otherwise ingenious-but be sure it is your own and gives us an impression of how you think about the world.

Love, Non-Dairy Creamer, Sleep and Dreams, Gray, Crop Circles, The Platypus, The Beginning of Every­thing, Art, Time Travel, Language, The End of Everything, The Roanoke Colony, Numbers, Mona Lisa’s Smile, The College Rankings in U.S. News and World Report, Consciousness.

So pick three from that list every year.

All that remains, then, is implementation. Given the size of college administrations, that is probably this system’s most difficult obstacle. But if a system like California’s public schools – and the University of California – worked together such a system would be decently easy to put together. It would provide a breath of fresh air for the state’s college system, helping it recruit students based on more than just numbers. And in comparison with college entrance exams in countries like China, it would fit in a little better with the spirit of the American university.