The ICU Entrance Exam: Otsukare-Sama!

Yesterday was the ICU Entrance Exam and I was one of the faculty proctors for the all-day testing event from 9-4pm covering LARA, social sciences, natural sciences, humanities, and English. The stamina that the test-takers need to have is amazing. I want to give my welcome and respect to the close to 1800 students who sat for the test.

The mysterious "LARA" is ICU's most unique test. It stands for Liberal Arts Readiness Assessment, and the questions look like this. How these questions measure whether students are ready for liberal arts is unknown to me, but apparently the theory is that ICU wants students who have flexible minds and can synthesize and apply their math, language, science and other knowledge to solve problems they have never seen before. I am sure that some department at ICU carefully studies the validity of the questions for selecting the type of students we want to come to ICU, so I will leave it at that and just marvel at the intelligence of the students who do well on these questions.

Notwithstanding the name LARA, I think the other tests are more clearly testing liberal arts skills. Personally, I like how the social sciences, natural sciences and humanities tests require students to read long academic texts and answer questions from the context of those texts. I would think only students who are accustomed to analytically reading long intellectually challenging texts and thinking, writing, and talking about them will be successful. This, ideally, will promote meaningful learning in high schools or on a personal basis, and will attract motivated and skilled students who actually enjoy learning and thinking about issues rather than those who just want to get into ICU for the image.

In general, I see the ICU admissions process as successful based on the quality of the students I meet each year. Almost all of my students are highly motivated to improve themselves to prepare to become active global citizens with strong problem solving abilities and communication skills. Only rarely do I meet a student who got into ICU, but did not really want to work so hard in college or did not really have motivation to be challenged in a rigorous program of study.

Ideally, we would ask students to write a personal statement of purpose or essay to see potential for academic work in Japanese and English, but that would require a complex, and partially subjective evaluation process. Currently about a third of our students (200 out of 600ish) are admitted through recommendations of their schools or by special screening of the admissions office based on high school grades, recommendation letters, a personal essay, English standardized test scores, and an interview. Apparently there is no requirement for test scores on the Center test or other tests that would show aptitude for verbal, analytical, mathematics or subject-related skills. In the US, most admissions are like the AO exam, with the addition of the SAT to demonstrate general learning aptitude in a somewhat objective way.

Personally, while this is no doubt a complex process, I think it would be ideal if ICU and other universities in Japan screened for more students in an AO test-like format. It seems more reasonable to to place emphasis on what the student has demonstrated in high school and how much motivation for learning toward personal goals the student has, rather than the outcome of one day of testing. The washback effect on high school learning would no doubt be positive as instructors and students would be freed from the pressures of performing well on ONLY standardized tests. Motivation and personal goals should be taken into consideration as well as a one-day test score.

That being said, I have much respect for the students who came to ICU to do their best, and hope the students who deserve to come get to come!