There's No 'I' in 4.0

Using Words in College Admissions Essays to Predict College Grades

Excerpted from The Secret Life of Pronouns by UT psychology professor James Pennebaker

My linguist friend David Beaver and I were sitting in a bar talking about pronouns. (How many bar stories have you heard start off that way?) Wouldn’t it be great if there was some simple relationship between word use and how people later behave in life? We started to challenge each other about possible language samples we could get that could be linked to important real world behaviors. And then I remembered Gary Lavergne.

Several years earlier, I had met Gary, the chief researcher in the University of Texas at Austin’s Admissions Office. Gary was not your usual statistician. He has published a series of nonfiction thrillers on mass murderers and, most recently, a book on the history of school desegregation in Texas. He was also interested in what factors predicted who would succeed college. The University of Texas always has one of the largest student bodies of any campus in the United States. Although the school enrolls over 7,000 new first year college students each year, the admission standards are surprisingly competitive. Part of the application process involves students writing two general essays.

Could the function words students use in their admissions essays predict their college grades? This was an appealing question for both David and me and, as it turned out, for Gary as well. To be clear, this was not a strategy to invent a new way to evaluate college essays to determine who should be admitted. Rather, we first wanted to learn if word use was related to academic performance and, if it was, whether we could influence the students to become better writers and thinkers in college.

We eventually analyzed over 50,000 essays from 25,000 students who had enrolled over a 4-year period. The results were straightforward. Word use was indeed related to students’ grades over all four years of college. The word categories most strongly related to making good grades were:

 High rates of articles and concrete nouns

 High rates of big words

 Low rates of auxiliary and other verbs (especially present tense)

 Low rates of personal and impersonal pronouns

These constellation of words should look familiar to you. You might recall from earlier chapters that people differ in the degree that they are categorical versus dynamic thinkers. A categorical thinker is someone who tends to focus on objects, things, and categories. The opposite end of this dimension are people who are more dynamic in their thinking. When thinking dynamically, people are describing action and changes. Often, dynamic thinkers devote much of their thinking to other people (which explains their high use of pronouns).

Does this mean that categorical thinkers are simply smarter than dynamic thinkers? Not at all. However, the American educational system is designed to test people concerning the ways they categorize objects and events.

Look at the two examples of college admissions essays that differ along the categorical versus dynamic thinking. (The actual content of these essays have been changed considerably while keeping the rate of articles, nouns, large words, verbs, and pronouns intact).

The categorical thinker

The concept of choice has played a prominent role in Western philosophy. One’s personality is polished to a more defined state by both conscious and unconscious considerations. The ultimate aim of liberty cannot be reached without a thorough control over the choices one makes. The divorce of my parents made me lead a double life. My partial withdrawal from reality had severe negative effects, including the inability to understand other viewpoints…

Notice how the writer’s sentences methodically define and categorize thoughts and experiences. The writing is structured and largely impersonal but, at the same time, ponderous. Compare the categorical thinker with a more dynamic one.

The dynamic thinker

I looked over at my brother, who was much older and wiser, only to see him crying. Before I knew it, I was crying too. I didn’t really know why, but if my brother thought it was bad, it was bad. Everyone moves, but it was the magnitude of my journey, a 700-mile trip from a small farming village to one of the biggest cities in America. It was going to be challenging but also an opportunity to grow. It involved giving up everything that is important to young children; family, friends, school.

The dynamic writer is far more personal and works to tell a story. The language is more informal and simple, using shorter words. Every sentence has multiple verbs which has the effect of making the story more alive.

Although both of these students came to college with virtually identical high school records and received liberal arts degrees, the categorical thinker had a much higher grade point average every year in college. It wasn’t because the categorical thinker was a better writer. Rather, a categorical thinking style is more congruent with what we reward in college. Most exams, for example, ask students to break down complex problems into their component parts. At the same time, very few courses ask students to discuss ongoing events or to tell their own stories.

Most universities will never use word counting programs to decide who to admit to college. Once students discovered such a system was operative, their admissions essays would be a jumble of big words, articles, and practically verb-free. Instead, findings such as these point to ways we might think about training our students in high school and earlier. To the degree that categorical thinking is encouraged and rewarded in our educational systems, students should be explicitly trained in doing it.

Another argument is that we should explore whether dynamic thinking should be encouraged at the college level. Telling stories and tracking changes in people’s lives are skills that can serve people well. It also raises the question about how successful people are in the years after college. Is it possible that dynamic thinkers are better adjusted or happier? And finally, how flexible is thinking style? It is entirely possible that all of us occasionally need to think categorically and, at other times, dynamically.