<p>Heyo-
Tufts student here.</p>
<p>Our admissions department is pretty holistic. In 2006, they started claiming that the newly admitted class, 2010, was about as book smart as Tufts actually wanted- past the admissions statistics of 2010, they were no longer seeking dramatic increases in the average GPA and SAT of admitted classes. Instead, they wanted students that fit with the schools’ educational and civic philosophy. At that point, new Dean of Students Robert Sternberg (past president of the American Psychological Association) had some new admissions materials created that are meant to measure qualitative factors like creativity, passion, sense of responsibility, etc. These generally take the form of strange, open-ended essay prompts, but also include things like “Here’s a blank sheet of paper- create something. We don’t care what” and “Write an extremely short play”. Sternberg did some research while he was at Yale about how to turn responses like that into useful data about someone’s personality, and we use it.</p>
<p>So, I can’t really chance you for Tufts without knowing you. But I can tell you that to increase your chances of getting in, you should emphasize passionate though pragmatic idealism about improving the world, with special emphasis on either local communities, third-world countries, or (even better) small communities in third-world countries. Try to exude creativity, a love of learning, and the desire to make a difference in the world.</p>
<p>Incidentally, the process I described above seems to have been horrifically misinterpreted by ambitious high school students as an attempt to artificially lower our acceptance percentage and raise our yield by rejecting kids with stellar GPA and SAT scores who would probably go to more prestigious schools. By surfing around this site, I heard this idea, and the corresponding term “Tufts Syndrome” for when other schools do it, for the first time.
Sorry, all ye 4.0, 2400, statistics-driven high school students. You got rejected because we didn’t like your personality, not because we figured you would go somewhere else. Maybe if you had spent less time in books and more time trying to interact with the real world, you would have gotten in.</p>