The Chronicle
The independenT daily aT duke universiTy
MONDAY, MARCH 29, 2010 ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTH YEAR, IssUE 120
www.dukechronicle.com
Duncan grabs individualtitle as Duke wins LizMurphey,
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“No one ever in India or Bangladesh said that, but some guyin England thought I was the Mother Teresa of economics.”
—Nobel laureate Amartya Sen in an exclusive interview.
See Q&A page 3
Need more basketball?
Head to dukechronicle.com for photo lide-how from both the men’ and women’Elite 8 contet.
by Jessica Lichter
THE CHRONICLE
Nearly two decades ago, before Duke hadbecome an internationally renowned researchinstitution, the University crafted a ersonal-ized admissions rocess to evaluate rosec-tive students.Designed to handle 12,000 alications,the model entails multile readers, a relimi-nary rating system, a committee session to dis-cuss alicants and a final review rocess.Now, with 26,731 high school seniors a-lying to the Class of 2014, the system is be-ginning to show signs of strain. Although thedecades-old admissions model served to select this year’s class, Dean of Undergraduate Ad-missions Christoh Guttentag said the rocess was not made for today’s hyer-cometitivecollege admissions environment.
Multiple reding nd rting
After a rosective freshman turns in analication, all submitted materials are readtwice—first by individuals trained to read a-lications, and second by regional admissionsofficers resonsible for reading all of the ali-cations from a given geograhic area.Guttentag said it takes about 30 minutes to“first read” an alication and 15 to 20 min-utes to “second read” an alication. Regionaladmissions officers in charge of the largest re-gions with 1,800 alicants send about 45 to
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App increaseoverwhelmsreview system
by Patricia Lee
THE CHRONICLE
MEMpHIS, Tenn. — As senior Krystal Thomas left Sun-day’s noontime ress conference, she hummed a song whilethe rest of her teammates, and even her coach, laughed onthe sidelines.The team’s carefree mood held throughout the confer-ence, an indication of how oised it was for tonight’s gameagainst Baylor at FedEx Forum for a chance at the Final Four.Desite rojecting a casual demeanor, however, the layersare reared to emloy stronger defense against No. 4 Baylor(26-9) and its 6-foot-8 star, freshman Brittney Griner.“She’s a tall ost, and she’s a great shot-blocker, so this will be our biggest challenge, but we’ve been there, we’vesucceeded and we just need to do that again,” senior Joy Cheek said. “Defense is a big art of our offense, and we’llhave to lay like we did in the Tournament... and get thosesteals and oints.” And though the Lady Bears have a young team—two freshmen
Same opponent, same result?
BAY71duke 78
ONWARD TO INDIANAPOLIS
michael naclerio/The chronicle
Members of the Duke squad,along with head coach Mike Krzyzewski,revel on the Reliant Stadium court afterDuke’s win over Baylor Sunday evening. The victory brings the Blue Devils to their first Final Four since 2004.
by Sabreena Merchant
THE CHRONICLE
HOUSTON — A Final Four for Duke,at last.On the 18th anniversary of Christian La-ettner’s eic jumer as time exired to sendthe Blue Devils into the final weekend, No.1 Duke (33-5) reached that showcase again,defeating No. 3 Baylor 78-71 Sunday at Reli-ant Stadium in the South Regional final.It will be the team’s 15th Final Fouraearance in school history—and the11th under head coach Mike Krzyzews-ki—ending a five-year absence from col-lege basketball’s most hallowed stage.The Blue Devils are the only No. 1 seedleft in the NCAA Tournament.“We’re ecstatic, roud, feel very hon-ored and rivileged to be going to theFinal Four,” Krzyzewski said.Duke got the victory behind a virtuosoerformance from junior guard NolanSmith, who led the way with a career-high29 oints and was named most outstand-ing layer of the South Region. Senior Jon Scheyer, who earned all-Regionalhonors as well, added 20 of his own asthe Blue Devils’ long-range shooting andadvantage on the offensive boards wastoo much for the Bears (28-8) to handle.In a contest in which the Blue Devilsshot 10 ercent worse from the field than
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chrisTina pena/The chronicle
Forward Krystal Thomas, seen here driving to the hoop against San DiegoState, will have her hands full on the block defending Baylor’s Brittney Griner.
AdmiSSionS
IN DEPTHParT 1:
getting in
Admission rate drops to14.8% for Class of ’14
LOOKING AHEAD
This story is the rst o athree-part series that willexplore dierent acets othe admissions process.
• Part 2 will examine
how dierent goals theUniversity sets or itselinfuence the admissionsprocess.
• Part 3 will examine
how the University’s aimto achieve socioeconomicdiversity maniests itselin the admissions processand in the composition othe student body.
2 | MONDAY, MARCH 29, 2010 THe CHRONiCle
HolyWeek
Schedule of Events
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All are invited to all services. All events in Duke Chapel unless otherwise noted.For more information, visit www.chapel.duke.edu
TERM 1: May 19 - July 1
summersession.duke.edusummer@duke.edu/684-2621
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worldandnation
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Vatican may go to courts
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Blast kills five in Iraq as electoral fallout continuesDemocrats in Congress ask CEOs to back health costs
Karin BrUlliarD/The WashinGTon posT
A soldier helps a group of children cross the street in Pirano, a village in the mountains of Pakistan. Heis part of an effort to give these children back their childhood, lost when the Taliban recruited them.Pakistani authorities say the Taliban have camps for child fighters.
THe CHRONiCle MONDAY, MARCH 29, 2010 | 3
60 hours er week reading alications from January through the first week of March.“Both of those are very careful, word-by- word, and course-by-course, analyses of thedetails of the alication,” Guttentag wrotein an e-mail. “These are close reads.”But reading alications is not an entire-ly qualitative rocess. Both readers assignedto an alication rate an alicant on a five-oint scale in each of six categories: curricu-lum, achievement, letters of recommenda-tion, extracurricular activities and ersonalqualities, essay and standardized testing.This rating system hels admissions offi-cers magnify what would ordinarily be con-sidered minute differences among ali-cants, Guttentag said. A student who scoresa 750 out of a ossible 800 in all three sec-tions of the SAT—critical reading, mathand writing—would likely fall in the 99thercentile for testing. But the cometitivenature of its alicant ool means Dukeadmissions officers make a distinction finerthan the to ercentile in the nation.Indeed, the threshold for achieving afive in each of the six evaluation categoriesis high. Receiving the full five oints in test scores, for examle, would require SATscores that fall in the high 700s across allthree categories, Guttentag said.In “Admissions Confidential,” a bookthat describes the admissions rocess inlace at Duke 10 years ago, author andformer Duke admissions officer RachelToor writes that receiving a five in the ex-tracurricular activities category tyically entails accomlishing something on thenational level. When asked what the average admit-ted student receives in each of the fivecategories, Guttentag did not rovide asecific number.“The tyical Duke matriculant is a smart, very smart, talented, engaged erson,” Gut-tentag said. “Not fives across the board.”
scoring point only goe o fr
The rating system, however, is not thedeciding factor in the admissions rocess.Instead, it serves as a guide to hel admis-sions officers make decisions. After the second rating, the regionaladmissions officer recommends that somealicants be automatically admitted ordenied. These alications are then sent to either Guttentag or a senior associatedirector who usually follows the regionalofficer’s suggestion.Guttentag added that such decisions arenever made based on the ratings alone.“What we find is that as a rule, thehigher somebody’s ratings are, the greatertheir chances of being admitted,” he said.“But the day we have a hard cutoff is theday we are doing something wrong. That isan anathema to me.”The remaining alicants are then dis-cussed in admissions committee rounds. Ad-missions committees are organized by regionand last seven to 10 days, Guttentag said.“The thing that always amazes me about it given the number of alications we get is how well we know each alicant,” said Associate Dean for Undergraduate Educa-tion Donna Lisker, who sat in on the Cali-fornia committee this year. “The files areread and re-read, and since we read state by state, we go into it knowing the school, theguidance counselor and the rincial.”In committee, regional admissions offi-cers advocate for their alicants in front of other admissions officers, including ei-ther Guttentag or a senior associate admis-sions officer. Although Guttentag said most conver-sations in committee fall into a three-tofive-minute range, some are as short as twominutes and others as long as 10 or 15.“You get very territorial,” former Dukeadmissions officer Laura Sellers said. “Ev-eryone talks about ‘my kids’ because youreally identify with students whose alica-tions you’ve read.”Following committee rounds, there isa 10-day eriod during which Guttentag“scults” the incoming class, changingsome of the decisions made in earlier stesof the rocess. Admissions officers re-eval-uate certain alications and then send asubset to Guttentag for reconsideration.Many of these alterations are madebased on a comlex mathematical analysis,accounting for exectations in class sizeand yield, provost peter Lange said.For instance, Guttentag said Duke ini-tially over-admitted alicants into pratt School of Engineering this year but under-admitted alicants into the Trinity Col-lege of Arts and Sciences. Guttentag saidhe consequently changed the admissionsdecisions for 500 to 1,000 alicants.
a trin on the proce
Although this year’s record-low acce-tance rate of 14.8 ercent makes a Dukedegree all the more enviable, it also under-scores the stress a large number of ali-cants laces on the University’s 20-year oldadmissions model. With 6,000 more students alying since2008, Guttentag said Duke has exerienceda larger increase in alications in the last two years than it had in the revious 10.“It’s an incredible workload,” he said. “Overtwo years we have had a 30 ercent increase inalications with no additional staff.”In revious years, the largest regionscomrised 1300 alicants, Guttentag said.This year, tyical regions had between 1400and 1800.Because of the sheer volume of ali-cants that needed two readers this year,Guttentag said he delayed the start of com-mittee rounds by a week.Logistically, the high number of ali-cants also restricted the number of individ-uals who were discussed during committee.In 2006, Guttentag estimated that the to5 ercent and the bottom third of the a-licant ool were sent to him to be eitherautomatically admitted or automatically denied, resectively.This year, admissions officers collectively recommended that more than half of thealicants be denied without review in com-mittee, Guttentag said. He added that admis-sions officers only recommended that 500 to700 alicants be automatically acceted.“I’m not hay with the ressure there was this year with the number of students we could talk about in admissions commit-tee,” he said. “When I arrived 18 years ago,I think we talked about every alicant.”This year’s larger ool also made thedecisions at every oint in the admissionsrocess less certain, but also allowed admis-sions officers to revisit their decisions mul-tile times, Guttentag said.“So is there something to fix? I think we’ve made excellent decisions this year,”he said. “But it was through a rocess that was designed for a much smaller numberof alicants. It was a different model.”This summer, in a meeting where deansof undergraduate admissions at selectiveuniversities convene, Guttentag said hehoes to discuss the decades-old admis-sions model in light of today’s highly com-etitive alicant ool.
Economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen was at Duke this weekend as part of a two-day series of events honoring the work of Craufurd Goodwin, James B. Duke professor of economics. Sen,Thomas W. Lamont University professor and professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University, gave the keynote address of the celebration, speaking on “The Uses and Abuses of Adam Smith” in the Goodson Chapel Friday afternoon. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 for his work in wel- fare economics. Born in present-day Bangladesh, Sen is known for his work on the economic principles of poverty, famine and gender inequality. Sen sat down with
The Chronicle’s Naureen Khan
before his lecture to talk about his economic theories.
The Chronicle:
Do you know Craufurd Goodwin?
amryt sen:
I know him by reutation only, I didn’t know him ersonally, but he’s a famous guy and this is a fa-mous lace and a good center, and he lays a major art inconstructing what it is now so it seemed a good thing to do.
TC:
Talk a little bit about how your background—grow-ing u in Dhaka and in Bangladesh—has influenced your views on develoment and how they iqued your interest in those kinds of issues.
as:
How does the ancestral background or the early back-ground of your life affect your work? I wish I knew it and Icould analyze it well. I see other eole write on it—sayingthis clearly affected him. I am always interested and resect-ful of other eole’s views about what haened, but I’m not sure I ut great confidence in self-analyzing, saying that ar-ticular exerience led to that articular kind of work. But ob- viously, I had a hay childhood…. It was a good way of grow-ing u. It’s a roblematic country. There’s overty, there wasa famine when I was young, there were riots that took lacethat came from nowhere and disaeared into nowhere. It affected a lot of eole’s lives, a lot of eole died and ob- viously these things did influence me, but I’m not going toontificate on how each of them had an imact on my work.
TC:
You won the Nobel prize in 1998 and there’s beenthe criticism that that articular rize is given to eole who are not in touch with the real world—with you beingthe excetion. Do you have any thoughts on that?
as:
I don’t take the view that technical work is necessar-ily irrelevant to the world. I don’t think that’s quite the case.Secondly, I don’t think I am an excetion in the sense that if you look at the Nobel citation, most of the aer they referto… is quite technical. Since the first aer is called “TheNecessary and Sufficient Conditions of Binary Consistency of Majority Decision,” I wouldn’t try to sell it as a human-istic work…. I wouldn’t sell it as non-technical work. Andthirdly, it is very imortant to have the motivation to workon roblems which are relevant. I don’t know whether I’vesucceeded in doing it, but I’ve certainly tried. I think themain roblem arises from the technicality of it.
TC:
How has the global economic downturn affected views on develoment and social welfare?
as:
It deends on what your views were before the crisis. Idon’t think many eole have been changed at all by the cri-sis. But I do welcome the fact that some eole are re-exam-ining issues and their dee confidence that the market is self-correcting and indeed, basically you can’t do any wrong....My talk is on Adam Smith today because Adam Smithdoes discuss exactly that question, and I do in fact talk about Adam Smith and the economic effects of the resent cri-sis with Adam Smith’s 18th century thoughts. It was never
ADMISSIONS
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naTe Glencer/The chronicle
Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen spoke on the abuses of Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand theory in Goodson Chapel Friday afternoon.
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