Bard College's Unique Admissions Process

Bard College has a creative, one-of-a-kind admissions process – The New York Times outlined it here just shy of a decade ago – that essentially allows students who feel stifled or belied by the traditional (GPA, Extracurricular, Recommendation Letter, etc. obsessed) College Admissions process to instead just take a writing exam: 3 essays of approximately 2500 words each on 4 particular subjects. (More on those later.) Candidates who pass are extended an admissions offer - no (few) questions asked. Simple as that!

As someone who’s going through the College Application ordeal myself – granted, it’s an exciting time, but also a terribly stressful one – I was delighted and relieved to hear that there are alternative methods available out there for those who feel so compelled.

What’s wonderful about this particular approach is that it evaluates not only your capacity to write cogently and pertinently, but also your understanding of various important – generally culturally relevant – subjects. The Common Application essay pretty much grants you the liberty of writing about anything and everything you wish; the Bard essays, on the other hand, are much more difficult: intellectual, circumscribed, recondite. I logged onto the Bard Application portal, created an account, signed an honor form, and was finally given the prompts. There are 4 categories: Social Studies, Language and Literature, Arts and Science, and Mathematics and Computing, each with 4 respective problematics. Take one in Category B, Language and Literature:

Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose” (1835) is considered one of the funniest works of Russian literature. It is the story of a man who wakes up one morning without his nose. But as its narrator quizzically puts it, “the most incomprehensible thing of all is, how authors can choose such subjects for their stories.” Ever since Aristotle, students expect to glean some wisdom from literature. But then, what to make of seemingly gratuitous and absurdist stories like Gogol’s “The Nose"?

This requires students first to read and understand “The Nose”, then write a 2500-word thesis on why anyone would write such a seemingly senseless and inane story. And for the sake of brevity, I picked one of the “easier” (note the quotations) and more straightforward prompts. One in the Social Studies section asks you to analyze Seneca’s quote “Real joy, believe me, is a stern matter”, which he wrote to his friend Lucilius; suffice it to say, surface level philosophical knowledge will probably fall short. You’ve got to peruse Seneca’s letter, which seems to me an entire assignment in itself. Or you might read historian and sociologist Max Weber’s lectures – “Science as a Vocation” (32 pages) and “Politics as a Vocation” (62 pages), which address the nature of “Learning, Scholarship and Political Action” and focus on a particular facet with which you either agree or disagree. And don’t forget, you’ll be answering 3 such prompts! So what may at first have seemed only a writing exercise, is also a measure of your understanding of literature and philosophy and science and politics and the like.

This is in manifest, staggering contrast with the Common Application essay prompts, say:

Reflect on something that someone has done for you that has made you happy or thankful in a surprising way. How has this gratitude affected or motivated you?

Much more broad and personal, right? Requires very little intellectual inquisition. No mention of Emily Dickinson or Emerson and Meier. (Both concrete examples, by the way.) And if for whatever reason you find yourself unmoved by, or struggling to answer, any of the 6 like-minded prompts, you’re given an easy out:

Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you've already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.

It doesn’t get much easier than that. (Though to be fair, I myself find the 650-word limit very restrictive and frustrating.)

Of course, it’s pretty obvious and self-explanatory why Bard’s got to work you a lot harder: Whereas the Common Application essay is just one of many various components in your Application, Bard’s essay is the sole and deciding one. Harvard’s going to get an idea of who you are, what you’re capable of, through your grades, your extracurriculars, your recommendation letters, even your standardized tests; Bard’s entire decision is effectively founded on your writing 7500 words, give or take. That’s why they’ve got to incorporate so many other (relatively rarefied) intellectual dimensions, like the aforementioned. To me, though, and the many others who apply to Bard, it’s worth it. It’s all good and well to boast impressive, eye-watering extracurriculars, but the fact remains that not all of us want, or are able, to spend the entirety of our afternoons volunteering, playing 4 sports, participating in debate and economics clubs or meeting with politicians. To me, it all seems terribly superficial: Why spend time and energy on activities I don’t genuinely love? To slightly bolster my admissions chances? Knowing millions of other students are thinking and doing the same thing? Thanks, but no, thanks.

For what it’s worth, I seriously wish more colleges would embrace the Bard Application philosophy. I’ve always been particularly humanities-minded – anything literature, history, philosophy etc. fascinates me – so I love Bard’s highly cerebral approach. But other colleges need not copy that philosophy: Take a science focused institution, like MIT — they could evaluate prospective biology or physics applicants through, I don’t know, a series of laboratory experiments; future computer science majors through their writing of code. You get the idea. No doubt dogmatists and reactionaries will suppose such a concept impractical and ineffective, to which I would answer: Bard’s been admitting students that way since 2013 - clearly it’s worked, otherwise it would’ve quickly been scrapped.

In all fairness, there are nonetheless downsides to such an approach. One that immediately comes to mind is that a one-and-done exam greatly facilitates cheating — I would think. It would take seriously prolonged and concerted effort to cheat your way through 3 years of high school — hell, it would be damn near impossible — but you could probably get away with asking someone else to write 7500 words for you. Come to think of it, I wonder how Bard has been able to circumvent that. Who knows, maybe a Bard Admissions Officer will read this someday and provide an answer.

Likewise, if any Admissions Officer, from any school, stumbles across this, I hope they’ll ponder my suggestion. My wish is that gradually, more and more colleges will realize that the traditional process just isn’t suited to everyone, and there are other ways to gauge and evaluate an applicant’s proficiency – sort of how it dawned on everyone after a while that such standardized tests as the SAT and the ACT don’t accurately embody one’s readiness for college, either.