College Admissions for the 21st Century

By Robert J. Sternberg. 2010

133 citations recorded by the source corpus.

SATs, ACTs, GPAs. Everyone knows that these scores can't tell a college everything that's important about an applicant. But what else should admissions officers look for, and how can they know it when they see it? In "College Admissions for the 21st Century", a leading researcher on intelligence and creativity offers a bold and practical approach to college admissions testing. Standardized tests are measures of memory and analytical skills. But the ever-changing global society beyond a college campus needs more than just those qualities, argues Robert Sternberg. Tomorrow's leaders and citizens also need creativity, practicality, and wisdom. How can the potential for those complex qualities be measured? One answer is 'Kaleidoscope', a new initiative in undergraduate admissions, first used at Tufts University. Its open-ended questions for applicants, and the means used to score the answers, gives applicants and admissions officers the chance to go beyond standardized tests. Does it work? As Sternberg describes in detail, Kaleidoscope measures predicted first-year academic success, over and above SATs and high school GPAs, and predicted first-year extracurricular activities, leadership, and active citizenship as well. And every year that Kaleidoscope measures were used, the entering class' average SATs and high school GPAs went up too. What worked at Tufts can work elsewhere. New kinds of assessments, like Kaleidoscope, can liberate many colleges and students from the narrowness of standardized tests and inspire new approaches to teaching for new kinds of talented, motivated citizens of the world.

Subfields: Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/87c65fb8e0abecc403c45a584844cb7c1c5a91e7

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Citations in the corpus

ACCEL: A New Model for Identifying the Gifted (2016, methodology): “In one study (Sternberg & the Rainbow Project Collaborators, 2006; see Sternberg, 2010a), we used an expanded set of analytical, creative, and practical skills tests on 1,015 students at 15 different institutions (13 colleges and two high schools).”
Access Without Equity (2012, background): “Institutions can reward talents and skills that our increasingly multicultural democracy demands, for example (Guinier, 2003; Sternberg, 2010).”
The Assessment of Creativity: An Investment-Based Approach (2012, background): “We found that we did not obtain the ethnic-group differences that are typical of university-admissions assessments when we used our tests, and that students who were accepted with excellent creativity scores on Kaleidoscope did just as well as students accepted as outstanding in other ways.”