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ow does a school like Choate Rosemary Hall select new students

who will thrive here? That question has been at the heart of the
admission process for decades. But it is only recently that researchers
hired by the School have developed a new system of predicting academic
success, called the Choate Self-Assessment. When its results are factored
into students applications, along with the usual metrics of grades and
test scores, admission ofcers are able to do a much better job of picking
students who will succeed at Choate.

Now the Choate approach has been validated by

publication in The Journal of Educational Psychology,
the premier periodical in its eld. Its fall 2009
issue contained an article titled Are SSATs and GPA
Enough? A Theory-Based Approach to Predicting
Academic Success in Secondary School. Among the
coauthors: Choate Headmaster Edward J. Shanahan,
Director of Admission Ray Difey III, and Julie
Goodyear, Executive Director of Choates Icahn
Scholars Program.
The language of the article is restrained
and nuanced, as bets a scholarly journal. But
Ray Difey has no trouble decoding the research
ndings into plain English: In the study, when
admission ofcers consider the results of the Choate
Self-Assessment along with grade-point average
and test scores, he explains, they increase their
ability to predict applicants success by a factor of
three, compared with what they would achieve if
they weighed only grades and test scores.

The research is a hard measure of the soft

skills that many educators have long suspected are
crucial to students success, but have been largely
unable to quantify. This is the rst study of its kind
at a secondary school. Difey calls the ndings the
science behind the intuition.
Now in his 17th year in admission at
Choate, he has heard a lot of people who come
to him to tell him, Ive got a great kid someone that person thinks would be good at Choate.
But there are a number of great kids who have
struggled to succeed, he says, at Choate and at
other demanding schools.
When talking about these issues, Difey
says, I give a little quiz. I ask, in 1950, what percentage of applicants did Harvard and Yale accept?
The answer is 92 percent. Last year, it was 8 percent.
But in those 50 plus years, what has changed in the
admission process? Not much.

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Other institutions, including Choate,

have gone through a comparable process. A couple
of decades ago, Choate accepted about nearly 50
percent of applicants. Now its less than half that.
The byproducts of this intensied competition have
been grade ination, recommendation ination,
and even a black market in admission essays.
A sea of academic sameness is the phrase
Difey uses to describe the pool of applicants
through which he and his colleagues must navigate. With so many kids, all apparently so bright,
with such strong backgrounds, how does a school
choose? And once the choices are made, how much
condence can a school have that they were correct?
Those were questions that Julie Goodyear,
then a colleague of Difeys in the Admission Ofce,
was considering too. She explains, I was interested
in the correlation between standardized tests and
Choate success.

She talked with Headmaster Edward

Shanahan, and they decided to seek some outside
expertise. They called in Yale professor Robert J.
Sternberg. One of the countrys leading authorities
on theories of intelligence, he is also the father of
two Choate graduates, Seth Sternberg 97 and Sara
Sternberg 98.
It would prove to be a symbiotic relationship: Choate would get high-level expertise to
help address a growing concern, and Sternberg
and his collaborators would have access to Choate
as testing lab.
Among the theories Robert Sternberg developed is that of triarchic intelligence three kinds
of intelligence that work together. As he explains,
You need creativity to deal with a rapidly changing
world. The world is changing very fast, and if you
cant cope with the changes, then youre in trouble.
You need analytical intelligence, analytical skills, to
know if your creative ideas are good ideas. People
have new ideas all the time; that doesnt mean
theyre good. And you need practical skills to be
able to implement your ideas and persuade others
of their value.
Sternberg has been keenly interested in
the measurement and mismeasurement of human
intelligence since his own grade-school days. As a
young child, he did poorly on IQ tests. This marked
him for academic failure as his teachers projected
their low expectations onto him. But then he had
a fourth-grade teacher who discovered his potential, and he blossomed academically. He eventually
graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa
from Yale.
The work he and his team from Yales PACE
(Psychology, Abilities, Competencies, Expertise)
Center did at Choate, starting in the late 1990s,
involved devising a set of questions that would let
students rate themselves according to their:
self-esteem or academic self-efcacy,
(whether they managed their time well enough
to get their work done on time and felt condent
about that ability.)
locus of control (whether they ascribe their
academic success and failures to their own efforts or shortcomings, or to outside forces)
and intrinsic or extrinsic academic motivation;
(intrinsic motivation is seen as inherently better.)

18 | 19

Sternberg and his collaborators interviewed students to nd out what kinds of situations
would arise where these qualities would come into
play, and then from that they devised test questions
to assess those abilities.
The rst group to be studied consisted
of the rst three years of students to take part in
the Icahn Scholars Program. The Icahn Scholars are
high-ability students from less advantaged backgrounds who receive a fully funded Choate education, supported by the Icahn Charitable Foundation
and/or the Foundation for a Greater Opportunity.
Later, the Sternberg team assessed the
entire incoming class. This gave the researchers a
larger, more representative sample to work with.
They also worked with more performance-based
questions, rather than just self-reporting items.
The team found ve attributes or mindsets to be
critical, in both the smaller study sample and the
larger, more diverse one:
a strong internal locus of control;
strong intrinsic motivation;
a strong sense of self-efcacy;
creative intelligence, as measured by questions
asking students to tell stories or solve problems;
and what the researchers called tacit knowledge
of the environment.
This last attribute speaks to young peoples
ability to read their surroundings and take cues
from the behavior of others. A high-performance
environment like Choate is a place where a lot of
things are just understood. For students like the
Icahn Scholars, for whom boarding schools were
unfamiliar, that ability to pick up signals is crucial.
But tacit knowledge is important for
all students.That Choate is a boarding school, for
instance, means that students have to cope not only
with the academic rigors but with new lines of
demarcation between school life and social life.
What does it mean to run into teachers not only
during the school day but evenings and weekends?
What does it mean to have a birthday party going
on next door in your dorm when you need to get a
report written or a set of math problems gured out?
The ndings of the research Sternberg and
a team have done at Choate and elsewhere could
effect revolutionary change in school and college
admissions, with profound follow-on effects in the
larger society. This fall, Harvard University Press will
publish Sternbergs latest book, College Admissions
in the 21st Century.

If the Choate Self-Assessment is adopted

the way the SAT has been accepted for college
admissions, will that lead to a more truly meritocratic
society, since applicants will be judged on a fuller
range of their talents? Or will it just lead to more
homogeneous student bodies with each student
having a very strong internal locus of control, the way
some college classes seem to be all valedictorians?
Or to put the question another way: Is
there a danger that the ndings of the Choate SelfAssessment, or something comparable, could simply
be reduced to a number, like an IQ or SAT score,
that an admission ofce would plug into a formula
along with grades and test scores?

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Sternberg clearly hopes not, but he sees the danger.

If they had a formula and just added one more
number, he says, that would be disappointing.
He adds that hes not worried about this at Choate,
but I am at other institutions.
He stresses, Its about the skill of the
admission team, expressing his hope that the assessment will be used as a tool for looking at the
applicant in a broader way.
The work at Choate has already begun
to affect what might be called the vocabulary of
success in school admissions. Difey calls it a
healthy development in terms of industry-wide
terminology. He says that terms like self-efcacy,
internal locus of control, and tacit knowledge of
the environment make sense to other people in the
eld.
Choates work with Sternberg seems
to mesh with other developments in the eld of
education, which Difey points to as evidence of
the stars aligning: Shawn Achors wildly popular
lectures at Harvard on the science of happiness
stress internal locus of control as an important
tenet, for instance. Dr. Edward Hallowells inuential
book Childhood Roots of Adult Happiness notes the key
of a creative environment and developing ones
creativity. Others see connections with the work
of University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela
Duckworth. She is a pioneer in the study of what
she calls grit perseverance and passion toward
long-term goals.
Like Difey, Julie Goodyear sees larger
implications of the work. She is based in New York
City as Executive Director of the Icahn Scholars Program, but travels the country recruiting for Choate.
She says that what shes learned from the Sternberg

work informs her approach as she meets with

possible Choate applicants. Those are the qualities
I look for now, she says. I try to see if they have
those qualities.
Sternberg left Yale in 2006. He brought
his PACE Center to Tufts University, where is Dean
of Arts and Sciences. There, he has introduced an
assessment similar to Choates, but at a college
level, and incorporating more different kinds
of intelligence.
Sternberg has long been an advocate for
understanding intelligence more broadly than
just school smarts. He argues that prep schools
shouldnt be focused on just good students.
Rather, they should be trying to admit people who
will be the leaders of tomorrow.
And if thats the goal, he says, grades and
SSATs will give you some indication of who those
leaders are, but probably not that much. So it makes
sense to want to supplement those criteria.
This is exactly what Headmaster Shanahan
sees as the advantage of having an alternative assessment for young adolescents. Says Shanahan, The
Choate Self-Assessment gives us another instrument
to augment the predictive power of prior grades
and standardized test results. Analytical skills are
important for academic and life success, but other
skills matter as well. What is exciting about this
research that it will ultimately allow schools
to customize admission batteries to those key
ingredients, for example, leadership or creativity,
considered essential to continued academic success
and learning.
Adds Difey, This work has given us an
incredible platform, as we travel around the globe
and down the street, to use in talking with parents
and educators about what really matters, what is
important to teach in the early years to develop
healthy and successful students in school and beyond.
That is a revolution.

Ruth Walker is a freelance writer and former correspondent for

The Christian Science Monitor.