Colorado College replaces SAT Exam with Legos
By Dave Curtin
Denver Post Higher Education Writer
Feb. 1 - Colorado College, in an effort to attract minority and
disadvantaged students, is dumping those stodgy old
college-admission exams in favor of a novel Lego-building test for a
handful of applicants.
Instead of coloring in bubbles with a No. 2 pencil, selected high
school seniors are snapping together colorful Legos in hopes of
attending the prestigious private college in Colorado Springs.
The revolutionary test is designed to pinpoint students likely to
succeed at tough colleges despite below-average standardized
test scores. The Lego test helps identify initiative, leadership and
an ability to work in groups - qualities that hours-long ACT and
SAT tests never quite get at.
CC is participating in the national experiment with eight other
schools to recruit diverse students who probably wouldn't
otherwise qualify for admission. The stu dents will be admitted this
fall.
"This puts more emphasis on hard-tomeasure characteristics and
less on the standardized tests that frankly have been a stumbling
block for disadvantaged and minority students," said Terry
Swenson, CC's admissions dean.
With affirmative-action programs under legal fire, colleges and
universities are searching for minority admissions procedures that
can withstand allegations of unfair preferences.
Fourteen percent of CC's 1,900 students are American ethnic
minorities.
The Lego test is one of a dozen workshop activities over three
hours in which pencil and paper are thrown out. Other activities
include public speaking, conflict-resolution drills and personal
interviews performed under the watchful eye of high school
principals, teachers, counselors and college admissions deans who
evaluate the college hopefuls.
In the Lego test, groups of eight to 10 students are given a box
full of Lego pieces and told that they have 10 minutes to build a
robot exactly like one sitting on a table in the next room.
Each group member is allowed to look at the robot, one at a time
without taking notes. Evaluators then watch the group as they
snap together their version of the robot, giving each student a
score between zero and four.
"It's easy to latch onto the Legos, but this is not selecting
students by their ability to use Lego blocks," Swenson said. "The
Legos are a mechanism to force students to interact and see
which ones emerge as leaders."
The nine schools in the pilot program will admit a total of 100
students. The students were chosen in December from a group of
700 New York public high school seniors. Most in the pool were
African-Americans and Hispanics who had modest grades and
standardized test scores but personal qualities that counselors
believed would let them succeed at selective colleges.
"The more selective a college is, the more it needs to be in tune to
measuring motivation, drive, perseverance and adaptability - the
things that really translate into college success," Swenson said.
CC typically has 3,500 applicants for 500 spaces in its freshman
class.
After the battery of exercises, evaluators conduct half-hour
interviews with each student to identify qualities such as a
willingness to seek help if they're struggling academically. The
interviews account for one-third of their total score.
Family income and educational level of parents are the biggest
predictors of how well students score on traditional college
admissions tests, Swenson said.
"To a certain degree, those tests measure student background and
not perseverance and motivation to succeed," Swenson said.
"We're constantly trying to identify talent across the economic,
social and racial spectrum.
"The biggest question that hangs over this is to what extent this
tool will be valid in identifying talent. Can this move all of us
forward a little bit in our ability to identify it? That's what we're all
interested in," he said.
Colorado College has long been an innovator in higher education.
Its distinctive block plan, established 30 years ago, allows students
to take - and faculty to teach - one course for 3 1/2 weeks,
encouraging intense study and field experiences, before moving on
to their next class.
Colorado College and four other private liberal arts colleges will
take up to four students each during the pilot program's first year.
The other four are - Beloit, Carleton, Grinnell and Macalester. Four
state universities will admit 20 students each. They are Penn
State, Rutgers, Delaware and Michigan. All were asked to
participate in part because of their strong financial-aid programs.
Students may select the college they want to attend, but the
colleges have the final say in accepting the applicant.
The Lego test and the 11 other exercises were devised by Deborah
Bial, a Harvard doctoral student in education, and is supported by
a $1.9 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The
foundation is headed by William Bowen, a former president of
Princeton University who co-wrote
"The Shape of the River," a book that makes a case for affirmative
action in college admissions.
Each of the students selected will receive a $3,500 annual grant
from Mellon, on top of financial aid from the college. Bial used New
York public schools as the applicant pool in the pilot program
because of her previous work with students there.
She will track the students throughout their college careers,
comparing retention, grades, graduation rates and contributions to
their campus communities with all other students at the schools,
as well as with other students with similar high school grades and
standardized test scores.
If the pilot program succeeds, Bial plans to open centers to
conduct the tests on any student who wants them in urban areas
across the country.
The tests are seen as a way to help colleges maintain racial
diversity even if racial preferences are eventually banned.
The tests could probably withstand legal challenges as long as
whites as well as minorities take them, said Terence Pell, a lawyer
at the Center of Individual Rights, a Washington-based non-profit
law group that has sued colleges over affirmative action.
"If a school can show that this furthers its educational mission,
then it's well within its legal rights to rely on these tests, Pell said.
"On the other hand if it's disguised to gerrymander the admissions
system to get a certain result or racial mix, its use is legally
suspect." Race wasn't a factor in the selection, Swenson said.
"Given the nature of the demographics of the pool from which
they're drawing, they were largely selecting from a group of
Hispanic and AfricanAmerican students. But it wasn't exclusively
that way, and that wasn't part of the selection process," he said.
Universities across the country are adopting different strategies to
get around tightening legal restrictions on affirmative action.
Florida announced in November that state universities won't
consider race when making college admissions but instead will take
the top 20 percent of the graduating class from every state high
school to maintain diversity. In Texas, the top 10 percent are
eligible for admission.
Colorado public colleges and universities are required to show
continuous improvement in minority recruitment, retention and
graduation. It's up to the institutions how they achieve it.
>>>This could open them up to some novel lawsuits by parents whose kids managed
>>>put all the blocks together right. |
