College-entry tests make use of Legos

It's part of an experiment in nontraditional screening

Mary Jane Smetanka
Staff Writer
Star Tribune (Minneapolis-St. Paul)

When talk radio meets affirmative action, you can expect fireworks. Which is why Lorne Robinson, dean of admissions and financial aid at Macalester College in St. Paul, spent an hour on the phone with one angry radio listener Tuesday.

The man was upset because talk-show host Rush Limbaugh had read a news item about some colleges using Legos in a new test to recruit students who otherwise might not get in. One college he mentioned was Macalester.

In fact, Macalester and Carleton College in Northfield are two of nine selective U.S. colleges and universities that next fall may admit students chosen by less-than-traditional means. But a lot more than Legos is involved.

``I thought it would be an interesting experiment,'' said Paul Thiboutot, Carleton's dean of admissions. ``It fits in with our pattern of asking ourselves, `What is the potential of students to succeed?' There's no set formula on evaluating potential.''

The controversial test

The pilot program is a reaction to court challenges charging that some colleges give unfair preference to minority students in admissions.

Seeking new ways to identify promising students who might not shine on traditional pencil-and-paper entrance exams, a doctoral student at Harvard University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation joined forces.

The result, a new measure with the hefty name of the Bial-Dale College Adaptability Index, was used in a one-year pilot effort to screen 700 New York City public-school seniors who were identified by teachers, counselors and community workers as showing promise for college. Most of the students are black or Hispanic.

The effort looks for such qualities as leadership and communication skills. The 700 students were evaluated on 12 activities, including public speaking, personal interviews and the Lego exercise.

In the latter test, a group of students had 10 minutes to make a Lego robot exactly like one in an adjacent room. They were allowed to go out one at a time to examine the robot but prohibited from taking notes. The point was not to finish the robot but to be evaluated on such characteristics as taking initiative, strategic thinking and conflict resolution.

Those tests cut the group to 100 students. Students were interviewed to decide where to send their applications.

Possible schools include four major state universities -- the University of Michigan, Pennsylvania State University, Rutgers University and the University of Delaware -- and five private schools: Macalester, Carleton, Beloit College in Wisconsin, Grinnell College in Iowa and Colorado College.

Four students have applied to Carleton, two to Macalester.

The schools are free to reject the applications if officials feel students won't fit with their institution. The Mellon Foundation will contribute $3,500 each year to their education, and Robinson said students will be tracked by researchers to see how they do.

Thiboutot said the experiment fits with Carleton's philosophy of looking for new ways to evaluate potential students.

For Carleton and Macalester, college admissions is an art, not a science. Scores on entrance exams are part of the admission formula, but other measures and intangibles may enter the picture. Great high school grades may give one student a leg up, while musical talent, a challenging high school curriculum, a compelling personal essay, intense community involvement or an unusual recommendation may help others.

``But if you go back and look at graduates who become successful people, there's no uniform pattern,'' Thiboutot said. That mystery is part of what drew him to the index.

Some concerns

Ian Maitland, a professor at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management, said he isn't against experiments, but he is suspicious of why people would want to develop such an index.

Maitland is a former president of the Minnesota Association of Scholars, which opposes affirmative action and other policies it sees as promoting political correctness.

``There's a potent lobby out there which essentially wants to eliminate tests . . . simply because they don't produce the politically correct proportions of students by race, ethnicity and gender,'' he said.

That's ironic, he said, because today's college-entrance exams have their roots in tests that were developed as a backlash against favoritism that in the 1930s kept deserving students out of elite schools.

While Maitland is supportive of the experiment's one-year pilot run -- ``I don't want to see reproduction of the old racial patterns,'' he said -- he believes merit should be the criteria. ``My test is first: Are their motives clean, or is this just an end run?'' he said.

But in Robinson's view, traditional admissions measures don't work as well as they once did. By itself, the SAT college-entrance exam doesn't indicate much about college performance over four years, he said. Wrapping grades and high school classes into the equation helps as a predictor, but Robinson believes even those measures have grown shaky.

Grade inflation means that an A-average doesn't carry the weight it once did.

``In a lot of schools, if a kid shows up for class, they get a B,'' he said. Student essays may have been polished with the help of coaches. And there are wide differences in high school quality and rigor that admissions counselors can't know about.

``There are a lot of skills that we do not measure well in the admissions process,'' Robinson said. ``Look at Bill Bradley [who had mediocre SAT scores]. He was a Rhodes Scholar, and he's running for president.''

.

Staff writer Mary Jane Smetanka can be contacted at smetan@startribune.com

Republished here with the permission of the Star Tribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the Star Tribune.