Clues Stories

TERRE HAUTE, Ind. — Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology enrollment chief Jim Goecker does not care who your hero is.

It does not matter to him which book most changed your life, or how you describe a place that’s meaningful to you in no more than 650 words.

What he really wants to know is how confident you are in making yourself successful.

“We’re beginning to see it tells us more about success in college,” Goecker said, “which to me is more important than which book I’d take to a desert island and why.”

All you have to do is take a personality quiz — seriously! — and that, he says, could be the newest measure to determine whether you get into Rose-Hulman.

The mysterious formula of college admissions usually crunches test scores, transcripts and extracurricular activities to pop out decisions of yes, no or maybe later.

But some institutions such as Rose-Hulman are venturing into more creative ways — better ways, perhaps, and more precise ones — to divine the compatibility of their applicants.

“It’s time for us to objectively take a step back,” Goecker said, “and say, ‘Is this really the best we can do?’ ”

‘The path of the future’

At Rose-Hulman, the admissions office is ready to add a psychology tool, called “the locus of control,” that it thinks is a cheat-proof way to get to your very being and beliefs.

It’s a series of statements, such as “I’m going to college because it’s expected of me,” or “Studying every day is important.” You pick whether you most strongly identify with true or false.

Score it against a rubric to see where on the spectrum you fall: On one end, people feel they run the world. On the other, they feel they can’t help anything that happens to them.

Students who say they have some control over life’s events — known as having an internal locus of control — have been more likely to stay at Rose-Hulman and succeed, Goecker said.

“They see themselves as being able to control the outside world,” he said. “It’s really about taking advantage of opportunities.”

That’s as opposed to people who fall on the other end of the scale, he said, with an external locus of control, and think, “It’s the professor’s fault. It doesn’t matter what I do. Nothing is going to change.”

Rose-Hulman already uses the locus of control to examine retention rates from freshman to sophomore year and determine winners of highly competitive scholarships, Goecker said. It could become part of the application process as early as next year.

“It’s just another measure to help us determine between perhaps a dozen equally deserving academically young men and women,” he said.

“I would argue everyone ought to do it,” he added. “It shows families success and return on investment by improving the number of students successful upon graduation.”

Rose-Hulman also is looking into a “curiosity index” that gauges, well, curiosity. It could peek into how students problem-solve, Goecker said.

“We need self-starters,” he said. “We need an entrepreneurial mindset. Well, that’s a curious mindset. It goes well beyond what we want in the classroom.”

Initial results didn’t necessarily correlate with retention or success rates, so Rose-Hulman won’t factor the curiosity index into admissions. But the college is still interested in measuring students as they enter and then as they graduate to see how much they’ve grown during the course of their college career and how well the school is doing educationally at advancing that sense of curiosity.

“We’re still fairly early in this,” Goecker said, but he added: “I’m convinced this is a part to the path of the future, as far as college admissions.”

‘Looking for reasons to admit’

More unconventional methods tend to be tested by smaller liberal arts institutions, said National Association for College Admissions Counseling President Jeff Fuller.

Want to put together a video application, a la “Legally Blonde”? Go for it, Goucher College says.

Worried about SAT or ACT scores? Forget about it, says Hampshire College.

And a high school transcript — who needs one, if you’re applying to Bard College.

“When the day is done, ultimately institutions are just trying to find out if the student is going to be successful on campus,” Fuller said. “It’s a moving target.”

Test-optional schools, for example, likely have found better indicators for success on their campuses than test scores, he said.

“We’re not looking for reasons to deny a student,” said Fuller, who is also director of admissions at the University of Houston. “We’re looking for reasons to admit a student.”

At Purdue University, however, admissions director Pam Horne is intrigued by not-so-tidily quantified qualities but wary of tools that haven’t been universally adopted.

“I think that there are many of us who are very interested in the noncognitive factors that can help predict a student’s success,” she said. “And we know what some of those might be: perseverance, goal orientation, maturity in general, time management, self-determination — which are difficult to measure.”

So she’s sticking to the standards that are proven at Purdue. Prospective students’ academic preparations, she said, remain the best indicators of success: the rigor of high school curricula, grades and test scores.

To add layers of complexity that differentiate among students, Horne looks to their leadership services and recommendations from teachers and counselors. She points, too, to what students write in their personal essays about what they hope to get out of a Purdue education.

Discuss in your essay how your past experiences relate to your future ambitions, and she has a sense of your goal orientation.

Describe your struggles and how you have overcome them, and she gets an idea about your perseverance.

Tell more than a story — be a little analytical, self-reflective — and she learns about who you are and where you’re going.

‘I want to shine’

As students wind through the stress of applying to more and more colleges, many feel pressured to try to present themselves beyond good grades and test scores.

Michaela Breach, 17, a high school senior, is applying to six colleges, as well as for scholarships. Every essay requires research, several drafts and hours of work.

“It’s kind of hard to break out and be creative,” she said, “but you have to learn to do that, otherwise you won’t be selected.”

Will her essay for a scholarship at Indiana University, she fretted, show just how dedicated she is to expanding her worldview and learning new things?

Sam Bennett, 18, a college prep school senior, thinks she’s a strong candidate for Georgetown University or St. Louis University and can only hope admissions officers see “what I really want to portray.”

“I get decent grades, but I don’t test well. That looks bad,” she said. “I want to shine even though I have lower test scores.”

When prospective students submit their applications, will colleges really get who they are?

“You can only express yourself so much on paper,” said Alex Knop, also an 18-year-old senior. “One hundred fifty words, it’s like a tweet. You can’t really say that much. To say everything about yourself in 150 words is impossible, so they’re not really getting the full you.”

But as the admissions process evolves, maybe students will have other options to prove they deserve to get in.

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