In 1950, acceptance rates at Harvard and Yale were around 92%. By 2007, that number dropped to 8%. Yet little has changed in the way admission offices evaluate candidates in the last fifty-seven years.
Choate has always taken pride in its leadership among educational institutions. Last year, Choate became the only school among its immediate competition to include an optional self-assessment portion in its application. This new addition consists of 40 short-response questions for the candidate to answer. Nationally recognized and exclusive to Choate, it is designed to give the Admissions department a deeper understanding of each individual. “We’re trying to look beyond grades and test scores to what matters, in terms of determining someone’s success in this environment,” says Mr. Ray Diffley, Director of Admission at Choate.
Currently in its second pilot year, the self-assessment was developed by Dr. Robert Sternberg and his team at the PACE (Psychology of Abilities, Competencies, and Expertise) Center, currently residing at Tufts University. Mr. Diffley says, “It’s groundbreaking, never-done-before research that’s happening at Choate.” This team’s stated goal is “Transforming education, sciences, and society by redefining how we conceive of intellectual capability.” Eight years ago, Choate joined forces with Sternberg. His team studied the school’s population, initially with the Icahn Scholars Program, and formulated a set of qualities that every successful student at Choate possessed.
The self-assessment was born from these traits: motivation, self-efficacy, and internal locus of control. Motivation is the drive in a student. When a prospective student loves what he or she is doing, wants to do better, and gets excited about doing well, he or she can be considered highly motivated. A proper level of self-efficacy, or confidence, was evident in all successful students. People with low self-efficacy don’t believe in themselves or their intellectual abilities. People with an internal locus of control, when something goes wrong, examine their own level of responsibility. For example, when a student with an internal locus of control receives a poor grade, he or she thinks about what he or she did to produce the result, and how to avoid similar causes and effects in the future. Someone with an external locus of control in the same position places the blame for the bad mark onto other people—teachers, parents, or friends.
This year’s freshman class, the class of 2011, had the opportunity to take the test. Mr. Diffley says, “When someone takes the assessment, it’s about three times better a predictor of your grades than the SSAT is.”
Out of about 400 applicants that took the test, 86 are now current students. Because the test is still in the pilot phase, results are not yet used evaluative—they play no actual role in the admissions decision-making process. The Admission office is, however, tracking the enrolled students’ successes and monitoring their progress. Each grade students who took the test earn is under scrutiny, for the outcome of their experience is a factor in where further assessment research goes from here.
This is now Choate’s second year with the self-assessment portion on the application. Though it is currently optional for all applying, Admissions sees it as a required section in the future, says Diffley. It is one large part of the full assessment that Sternberg and his team developed for Choate.
The message this research gives? Diffley says, “You should be learning the things that are the most important to your success—not only academically, but in healthy life. And our analysis is absolutely focusing on the right things”
