When I realized that nearly half of the roughly 14,800 applicants to the University of Virginia’s Class of 2007 had applied online, it occurred to me that we had collected enough essays -- each applicant writes three, the longest of which is 500 words -- to perform some interesting statistical analyses. For instance, did writing on a certain topic affect an applicant’s chance of admission?
I did not set out to confirm or disprove any notions of what constitutes a good or a bad essay; in fact, the idea of a statistical analysis occurred to me only after I had used the database to determine whether two applicants might have plagiarized parts of their essays from a common source. I had read an essay that, in response to the question we ask all applicants to the College of Arts and Sciences -- “What work of art, music, science, mathematics, or literature has surprised, unsettled, or challenged you, and in what way?” -- compared Pink Floyd’s The Wall with The Wizard of Oz. Two days later, I read another essay that seemed very similar. Hoping that both essayists had applied online, so I could compare the two pieces electronically, I searched the appropriate field in the database for the phrase “Pink Floyd.” To my surprise, my query produced four records, including the two I was looking for. The essays turned out to be dissimilar enough that I ruled out plagiarism.
A few weeks later, a colleague in the admissions office lamented that so many arts-and-sciences applicants, in response to the same question, had chosen cloning as the work of science that had unsettled or challenged them. Having read many essays myself about Dolly the sheep, I wondered whether I could find any correlation between cloning essays and admission rates. How many applicants had written about cloning, and how well did they fare compared with applicants who chose other topics? I searched the database for “clone, cloned, cloning, or stem cell,” and my query returned 347 essays. Cloning did seem popular, until I searched for “Jesus, Bible, or God” and found 657 essays. More than 1,000 arts-and-sciences applicants, or more than 17 percent of those who had applied online, had written on religious beliefs, controversial new developments in science, or both; 67 essays included “cloning” and “God.” But did an applicant’s selection of topics affect his or her chance of being admitted? Did admissions officers prefer the ovine to the divine, or vice versa?
Of the 657 applicants who had written about religious beliefs, 228, or 35 percent, were offered admission. That is awfully close to the overall acceptance rate for applicants to UVa. Of the 347 people who had discussed cloning, 113, or 33 percent, were offered admission. Reluctant to jump to the conclusion that religion and cloning respondents fared exactly the same as did applicants at large, or that topic selection -- despite our groaning about all the cloning essays -- did not affect admission rates at all, I spent some more time with the data.
Although UVa’s acceptance rate hovers around 35 percent, no applicant actually has a 35-percent chance of being offered admission. In-state applicants are admitted at a rate of 45 to 50 percent, and out-of-state applicants at 20 to 25 percent. So I looked at in-state applicants who had written about religious beliefs and found that 47.3 percent were accepted. Of the out-of-state applicants who discussed religion, 22 percent were accepted. For applicants who wrote about cloning, admission rates were almost identical: Forty-seven percent of those from Virginia were accepted, and 21.5 percent of those from other states. Contrary to a colleague’s speculation that essays on religious beliefs and cloning must be “the kiss of death,” writing about those topics seemed to make no difference to an applicant’s chance of admission.
Before drawing too many conclusions from the fate of cloning and religion respondents, I decided to survey other colleagues in the admissions office to determine what works of literature they thought had been popular with our applicants. One person accurately speculated “any book they read junior year in AP English,” while others rattled off specific authors. I began with Shakespeare because, after God, he had “surprised, unsettled, or challenged” more applicants than any other author. Of the 126 applicants who wrote about Shakespeare, 31 percent were offered admission. Similarly, 31 percent of the applicants who wrote about Orwell, 33 percent of those who wrote about Faulkner or Ayn Rand, and 35 percent of those who wrote about William Golding were accepted.
When I turned my attention to two other authors, however, I noticed something different. Of the applicants who wrote about J.D. Salinger, only 18 percent were offered admission. And applicants who wrote about Vladimir Nabokov -- admittedly, there were only six of them -- were offered admission at a rate of 67 percent. Four were admitted, and one was placed on the waiting list.
Do those results prove that admissions officers prefer Humbert Humbert’s obsessions to Holden Caulfield’s observations? Not exactly. The impulse to write about Nabokov indicates that an applicant is already deeply engaged with literature that few students encounter in high school. The impulse to write about Salinger indicates that an applicant is less well read. It is telling that the average verbal-SAT score among Nabokov respondents was 735, while the average for Salinger respondents was 630.
Although admissions officers may bemoan the enormous number of essays on Dolly, we like to claim that we are not particularly interested in students’ choice of topic -- we are much more interested in form, style, and careful reflection, or what we sometimes refer to as quality of thought. The data I collected seem to support that claim.
One of the essays I particularly liked is an applicant’s response to the question: “Look out any window in your home. What would you change about what you see?” The applicant described “the primordial dance of husbands dragging trash bins to the curb” and gracefully moved from the particular (the neighbor and his trash can) to the universal (Americans produce a lot of trash). That essay was a success, but not because admissions officers are fascinated by trash. An applicant who wrote that well about garbage probably would have gotten in even if he had written about Salinger.
Marjorie A. Schiff is senior assistant dean of admission at the University of Virginia.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 22, Page B15