
































Microsoft Word - Dintersmith interview


[Expositions 15.1 (2021) 50–64]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 

What Colleges Can Learn from Covid-19:  
A Conversation with Ted Dintersmith 
 

 

KALEY M. CARPENTER 

Villanova University 

 

 

Former venture capitalist Ted Dintersmith first grew concerned about the state of American 

education when he compared the subjects and skills his own children were learning at their 

private, college-preparatory school to what he had been taught over thirty years before (they were 

the same). He was subsequently galvanized into education reform when the innovators he 

professionally funded confirmed his suspicions that those very same subjects and skills were 

already becoming obsolete in the digital age. Since then, Dintersmith has organized international 

colloquia at the United Nations, written two books, and produced an award-winning film—all 

documenting the destructive consequences on students from school days narrowly structured 

around standardized measurement instead of deep, experiential learning. Rather than exclusively 

embracing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education as a remedy, 

however, Dintersmith advocates an interdisciplinary, liberal arts, and project-based prescription 

for the stasis plaguing U.S. schools. With Covid-19’s quarantine exposing traditional curricula’s 

limited engagement and effectiveness, and the virus’s displacement of standardized testing as the 

(increasingly contested) measure to evaluate schools and their students, Dintersmith believes that 

the U.S. has an unprecedented opportunity to reexamine, and reform, its education system. He 

presents project-based learning as not only the pedagogical way forward through the pandemic 

but also as the best way to equip learners, from grade school through college, to thrive in its 

aftermath. He argues that university co-eds and their institutions that successfully leverage both 

virtual and local networks now—not to study obsolete things better but to learn entirely different 

things—will become the intellectually engaged problem-solvers most able help their fellow citizens 

in the future. He explains how in an edited August 26th–27th, 2020 conversation below. 

   



51  Carpenter 

  

Ted Dintersmith: I went to The College of William and Mary in the 1970s, and I heard my junior 

year about the ability to do an independent research project—to propose something you actually 

cared about to your faculty advisor who would approve it, if it was thought worthy. I was taking 

about half physics courses and half English courses at the time, so I said, “I really want to do that!” 

I proposed two such projects. In the past, however, dual projects had only been done in fields that 

you could readily combine (history and English, biology and chemistry, for example). But I wanted 

to do English and physics, even though, at first glance, there’s not really an intuitive way to 

combine them. To my faculty members’ credit, instead of telling me, “No, we don’t want to set 

the wrong precedent,” or “That’s probably more than you can take on,” they said yes to my 

proposals.  

So that’s what I did. What I write about and push for was true for me: that chance to say, “This is 

a problem I’m interested in, and I’m going to try to come up with something creative and different 

to make a contribution.” I checked in regularly with each faculty member and, in physics, I ended 

up as an undergraduate with two publications in The Journal of Physics—something most Ph.D.s 

in physics don’t do. 

I now help rising college juniors who pitch something similar, giving them funds to travel for 

research (we’ve had students go to the Louvre for art history and to Petra for archeology) and for 

presenting or publishing their papers. We crowd-source among alumni and support the faculty 

advisors financially as well. Now, over ten percent of the college’s students participate.  

We all know this is different from the large lecture courses that should have been done away with 

years ago. So what if kids can’t take those big lecture classes now? Imagine if you said, “It’s a 

pandemic. It’s a botched-up time, but we want to give all of our juniors and seniors the opportunity 

to replace ‘normal’ with one or several cross-discipline, ambitious initiatives.” The students would 

be responsible for recruiting one or more faculty mentors/advisors. Alums could be asked to step 

up: “Would you put in some time?” Students could also find somebody outside of the university 

community who has expertise. Their entire school experience during junior and senior year could 

be dedicated to creating these bold initiatives that make a tangible contribution beyond just their 

GPAs. Their learning experience would be much better, even if they couldn’t be on campus—they 

would still learn a ton. And it would be much better life-preparation than what they’re going to do 

otherwise.  



Interview: Ted Dintersmith  52 

To be sure, that’s a hard pivot. I know some faculty will say, “My three hundred-person course is 

so invaluable that it would be horrible if instead they took it on Coursera and EdX or something.” 

But, honestly, wouldn’t that kind of student-directed, civically relevant, community-supported 

project be a bold pedagogical response to the pandemic for a university? 

Here’s what it could look like. Supposing we gave academic credit to college students who can’t 

be on campus for finding children in their community who are desperate for instruction. They 

could organize a pop-up school and help them do exactly the kind of things we’re saying. Create 

initiatives. Cut across disciplines. Do great projects. They would learn so much about teaching! 

They could then report back to a faculty member weekly with reflections with analyses—complete 

with videos of the progress the kids are making.  

You could do this in any field. Take history. Capture consequences of the pandemic in real time 

in your community. There are so many things unfolding in this enormous arc of history right in 

front of our eyes. Capture it. Describe it. Do a podcast on it. Write a book about it. If you’re a 

physics or chemistry major, help your local community figure out its testing strategy. These kinds 

of initiatives seem to be the biggest of all opportunities today. And they all show what education 

can be. 

Kaley Carpenter: What you’ve just said relates directly to the effects of COVID-19 on students’ 

academic and personal lives. Their academic plans or professional tracks were affected. These 

disruptions included cancelled internships, study abroad trips, campus summer research programs, 

clinicals, medical professional shadowing, elective minors, and other academic course credit. 

While students had undoubtedly invested time and energy to secure these now-lost opportunities, 

what you described could serve as alternatives to them. Even the clinical medical shadowing could 

happen with technological assistance. With the right kind of willing office or practice, students 

could gain expertise/academic credit, perhaps even for helping to strategize the digital alternative 

or work-around. Whatever system the students helped structure and test could then be used for 

others in the future—e.g., to help include patients’ remote family members in health-care 

discussions. But it all goes back to students being ready and willing to take ownership of an 

educational situation instead of passively acquiescing to it. Is that the essence of problem your 

work is trying to address?  



53  Carpenter 

  

Ted Dintersmith: I’ve talked to many college seniors, and I’ve asked them what I think is a good 

question: “If you wanted to, what career path would you create for yourself?” They look at me 

and—whether they say it, or if it’s just in their facial expression—their response is, “That’s like, 

you mean … that’s an option?” Imagine making that option a reality for them instead of just 

jumping through all these hoops—and they’re really great hoop jumpers, right? Of course they are, 

because that’s what we value in our current educational system—even at the college level. We 

want the most agile and speedy hoop jumpers we can find. But then they get to senior year, they 

go to the Career Services office, they sign up for interviews, and I think they often end up in jobs 

they don’t really want. They’re not that happy doing them, and they’ve lost a chance to discover a 

greater purpose and mission in the process. 

Kaley Carpenter: Another concern in What Schools Could Be,1 your most recent study of K-

collegiate education reform, is the connection between American education and civil society. In 

addition to equity in education, you explicitly mention the 2016 election as revealing other deep 

fissures in our country, “[a] society breaking down as it struggles to analyze critically, to debate 

thoughtfully, to see seek and value truth, a civil society that’s beginning to fracture.”2 It’s now 

four years later, in 2020, after six months of this pandemic, an economic recession, civil unrest 

that is on par with what erupted in the 1960s, and with another presidential election coming. What 

would you like to see in education to help heal our civil society?  

Ted Dintersmith: Are we setting goals and policies for schools to really launch students into lives 

of purpose, or are we putting them through a hamster-wheel type of experience that largely ranks 

them on the basis of their ability to perform certain capabilities, certain tasks, that really bear no 

relationship to what will make them successful as an adult? I’m firmly convinced it’s the latter.  

I visit a lot of places. I interview a lot of people. I observe a lot. And the reality is that, for the most 

part (it’s always difficult to say this to somebody in higher education), school is about preparing 

students for test taking and for more school and not for preparing students for what they’re going 

to encounter in life. I believe that we are impairing their future by doing this. 

When I’ve talked to students who are crushing it academically, there’s a sense of emptiness and 

discontent they have, because they feel like they’re doing a lot of things they don’t care about. And 

it’s there when I’ve talked to the other 90% of students who are not viewed as gifted 



Interview: Ted Dintersmith  54 

intellectually—who, in addition, have heard year-in and year-out that they are not “one of the smart 

kids.” It’s a gross injustice to the futures of essentially all of them.  

One of my high school classmates said, “I hated school. School told me I was really dumb. I got 

terrible grades. It was pure misery.” Now he’s a master glassworks blower with a store in 

Massachusetts and an amazing portfolio of artwork. Even without a college degree back then, he 

at least could graduate high school and scramble and find his way forward. It’s much harder to do 

that today. When you start taking away what there was back then when I went to high school—

shop classes, home economics—courses that are largely gone because they’re not the “right thing” 

to have today—it is hard to see how there are still a lot of hands-on endeavors that students can 

do.  

One of the things I push for at the middle school, high school, college, community college level—

you name it—is this: out of all the time students are putting into studying, could we peel off some 

of it so that they develop a proficiency that creates a kind of a safety net for a career afterwards? 

If ten year-olds in West Virginia are getting good at something that would let them make three-

times minimum wage, then it stands to reason that years of non-stop studying is not the only way 

to economic or vocational success. I’m a big advocate for the liberal arts. You could be a 

philosophy major at Villanova—I actually like young adults with the self-confidence to pick a 

major with which everybody else says you could never get a job. Be a philosophy major, but then 

minor in copy editing, or fact-checking. Tie an intellectual passion with a minor that’s a hirable 

proficiency so that you’re not working at Starbucks, so that you’re doing something you find 

reasonably fulfilling, that’s aligned with your passions, so you can support yourself and make a 

contribution in the labor market while still having time to pursue your interests without asking the 

daily, dreaded question, “Can I actually feed myself and my family?” That should not too much to 

ask of collegiate education.  

Yet I inquired of a former college president, “What if you just offered one course with pragmatic 

skills, like how to master Excel spreadsheets or Salesforce.com—one course out of forty, or 2.5% 

of a student’s time at college, to get good at something that, Day One when they’re hired, they’ve 

got something that qualifies as a skill?” The answer was, “That’s a great idea, but I think my faculty 

would run me out of this office if I brought that up.” The message was, “Far be it from us to stoop 

to the level of a pedestrian employment branch. We are pursuing lofty goals.” But when students 



55  Carpenter 

  

spend four years and $75,000 to $300,000 to get what is essentially a paper certificate, it would be 

nice if they were good at something and, on the first day after graduation, they could hit the ground 

running. Two and a half percent of credit hours amid the 97.5% of time dedicated to lofty goals 

doesn’t seem to me like an outrageous request.  

Back to the question about how this all connects to civil society. I find that not many talk about it 

in this context, but if people put their faith in education to help them get ahead and don’t see that 

happening, then kids leave high school, leave community college, leave college without a single 

proficiency that the adult world values, and they just feel demoralized because they’re unemployed 

or they’re about to be unemployed. They don’t see a great way forward; they don’t feel like their 

child will have the same chances as the child of someone who is wealthy. What do they do? I wrote 

before the 2016 election that they’d be willing to throw grenades into the ballot box.  

The last blended poll said 38% of adults in America think that the current administration has been 

effective in dealing with the coronavirus. But when every other developed country in the world is 

showing six, eight, ten deaths a day, and we’re showing 1,200; when every other developed 

country in the world has schools reopening safely, and our school districts are afraid to; when the 

per capita adjusted death rate for the United States versus any other developed country in the world 

is running fifteen times or worse—that’s evidence. That’s data. Those aren’t subject to personal 

interpretation. The fact is that, six months into it, we’ve failed and other developed countries have 

largely succeeded in protecting their citizens, but polls show that almost 40% of adults in America 

report that we’ve done a good job of dealing with the coronavirus. Our websites all say in our 

schools—high schools, colleges—that we are to teach our students to weigh evidence to think 

critically, to deal with complex information. But if we can’t look at data and make responsible, 

logical conclusions, then something needs to change. 

Kaley Carpenter: If we’re concerned about equipping students not only to understand the 

complexities of assessing our country’s pandemic response, but also to navigate the pandemic’s 

changing economic and educational landscape, then it’s going to take agile faculty as well, right? 

During the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, here at Villanova, all faculty were offered multiple 

training opportunities and resources for on-line teaching within days of the announced closure of 

regular classrooms, and the majority of classes were successfully conducted through web platforms 

the very next week. So there’s evidence of a concerted faculty effort to switch delivery methods 



Interview: Ted Dintersmith  56 

and begin offering quality on-line education essentially over a weekend. But a statistical minority 

of faculty had serious difficulties with the adjustment, feeding stereotypes that what is taught inside 

college classrooms—and, now, how it is taught—fails to meet the needs of the world outside. How 

can we change this at the university level?  

Ted Dintersmith: You just mentioned statistics—let me give an example of how inertia in 

teaching like you describe has parallels in college admissions. I gave a talk a couple years ago to 

about 250 college admissions heads. I asked, “Would anybody in the room prefer a student who 

had taken statistics over calculus?” No one said yes. So, I replied, “You know, I’ve spent six years 

trying to find one adult in America—just one—who uses what’s taught in high school calculus. 

The answer is that no one does.” Mind you, I’ve been the lead author on published physics papers 

and 1975 and 1976. Back then, you had to do these integrals by hand. So I understand that calculus 

used to be something important—just like it used to be important to be able to drive a stick shift. 

It used to be important to know how to use the slide rule. In the 1940s, you couldn’t be an engineer 

if you didn’t know how to use a slide rule. We don’t teach kids to use a slide rule today, but we 

still teach them to do integrals by hand. 

So I say to the room of college admission heads, “Nobody uses calculus. But statistics is an 

enormously powerful career door-opener. It’s essential for being an informed citizen, and it enters 

into almost every personal decision you make (aside from whom you fall in love with and marry), 

like investments and healthcare. So, I just need to understand how you can look yourself in the 

mirror every morning saying, ‘I want kids taking something no one uses,’ when, generally, the 

consequences of that is they don’t take statistics, which is vital for career citizenship and personal 

decisions.” The college admissions heads’ response? It said it all, I think: “The smart kids today 

are taking calculus. It’s an easy, convenient way for us to rank them against each other.” 

So, we care a lot more about ranking kids and care nothing about whether they’re working on 

something that’s meaningful or will help them as adults. Instead, we should care about kids 

working on what will actually benefit them down the road in adult life. Until we do that, we live 

in this world of AP courses and GPAs and kids jumping through meaningless hoops. 

Kaley Carpenter: Where else have you seen the pandemic reveal the limits of secondary and 

collegiate education that you’ve documented in your books and film? Where is the pandemic 



57  Carpenter 

  

opening up new possibilities of convincing others that there’s a better way to teach and engage 

students? 

Ted Dintersmith: I circle back to the places I wrote about in What Schools Could Be, which are 

schools that intentionally worked hard to empower kids to set a lot of their learning agenda, to 

equip kids with the skills to manage their own learning and to draw on resources as needed. They 

get kids comfortable and actually eager to take on bold initiatives that cut across disciplines, that 

deal with lots of ambiguity, and that will undoubtedly lead to setbacks and dead ends. Their 

students take those on nonetheless and just persevere until they’ve completed something that 

they’re proud of, something that they can explain and present to others. These are places of student-

driven learning, or taking on authentic challenges that, in some way, shape, or form, make their 

world better. When I connect back with them and ask, “How’s it going during the pandemic?” 

their answers are always the same: “There are issues that are real hardships, particularly for kids 

in poverty. They miss their friends. They miss being with other people. They miss after-school. 

But they’re learning as much—or more—than they ever did.” 

When I talk to other educators who are more in the command-control vein of education, expecting 

students to be on the receiving end of the lecture, taking notes, and cram-jamming for a test, they 

say, “Oh, my God! Nothing’s working! Distance Learning is an oxymoron! It was hard enough to 

keep their attention when they were in front of us. Now that they’re at the other end of a Zoom 

screen, it’s impossible.”  

I use the familiar analogy: the schools that viewed their job and responsibility as teaching kids 

how to fish suddenly find that, if the kids can’t fish in their normal fishing hole, then they’re 

finding different fishing holes, and they’re still fishing. The schools that focused on merely feeding 

kids fish found that not only was it hard to make them eat fish in person, but it’s also very few kids 

who want to eat virtual fish now at all. There’s just a wide disparity. We’ve talked about all sorts 

of gaps in education, but I would say that this pedagogy gap, this gap in learning experiences, is 

just sky high right now. 

So one of the things we’re working quite intensely on is to try to get some resources available by 

the middle of September. In some places, kids are coming back to school, and maybe they’ll be 



Interview: Ted Dintersmith  58 

there all school year … but maybe they won’t. If I were betting, I’d say that, for most kids who 

restart school in person, it’s just a matter of weeks before they’re all sent home. 

What do you do during those weeks? Do you say, “Oh, my gosh! They didn’t eat as many fish as 

we wanted them to eat in the spring. Let’s make them gorge out on fish this fall!” Or do we say, 

“Now’s our window of opportunity to help them learn how to fish—because not only will that be 

great for them if, in fact, we close and it’s all remote. Not only will that be great if we open 

partially. It will be great if we open fully—and it will be great for them as adults.”  

To me, that’s the opportunity: teaching kids how to fish versus jamming fish down their throats. 

Ideally, I’d like it to be better fish instead of worse fish. I’ve got strong views on that—on what 

can really be taught in grades K through 16. But how often do we actually ask kids, “What do you 

want to learn?” How often do we then respond with, “We’re going to empower and support you 

to learn that. We will give you credit for what you learn if you can convince us you really made a 

contribution and mastered what’s behind that contribution.” 

Kaley Carpenter: The New York Times’ columnist David Brooks watched your film, “Most 

Likely to Succeed,” and criticized what he described as project-based education’s sacrifice of 

factual acquisition or content for developing lots of team work, grit, and self-confidence.3 He 

argued that facts, definitions, and concepts are the foundation upon which pattern recognition, 

usable knowledge, paradigm shifts, and finally wisdom is formed. How would you respond to 

someone who sees this tension or trade off in What Schools Could Be? In it you write, “It’s 

important to distinguish between teaching someone a subject and helping them to learn to think 

like an expert in the field. Should our kids study history facts or learn to think like a historian? 

Memorize scientific definitions or learn to think like a scientist? Answer canned questions about 

a poem, or learn to think like a literature critic? Drill on math microtasks, or learn to think like 

creative mathematician?”4 Don’t you need both? 

Ted Dintersmith: Yes, you need content, but it starts with engagement. And the engagement leads 

to the content acquisition. But when you reverse that—which traditional education does—and you 

say, “No, you need years and years of factual acquisition. And, by the way, even though we’re 

going to put years into that, and we’re going to build our entire testing infrastructure around it, 

we’re never really going to find the time or the money to just check to see if it’s retained (despite 



59  Carpenter 

  

the fact that the College Board has a billion dollar annual budget). Dartmouth, to their credit, did 

this kind of testing. In an experiment, every freshman who had taken AP psychology was, within 

that same year, given the Intro to Psychology final exam the first day of the class, and they all 

failed it. Their scores were compared to with other Intro Psych students who never had any prior 

psychology. There was no difference in performance. It was as though they had never taken AP 

psychology.5 

When I interview most high school kids who’ve taken history (particularly AP U.S. history) and 

ask them, “What did you learn?” their answer is, “I learned I never want to take history again.” Do 

they remember anything? Why is it two-thirds of Americans can’t name the three branches of 

government? Despite the focus on content, they didn’t learn anything. They just went through the 

motions. But if you’d said instead, “Learn how to think like a historian and start with capturing 

the history of your community, or the history of somebody you admire—it could be a family 

member, somebody in your community, or somebody famous. Pick something of interest and do 

the research and communicate to us, not just the facts of that history but how that history influences 

them and the world around them—and you—to this day.” 

Eighth graders in Fargo, North Dakota are required take state history. Some of the students I’ve 

met there decided to study Fargo’s historic downtown buildings, and they ended up creating 

documentaries for them, building a website to house those films, learning graphic design for 

signage and QR codes (for display in the building themselves), and submitting their work to the 

Fargo Film Festival. Were they learning the same sets of things they would have learned in an 

eighth grade class on the history of North Dakota? No. But if those students who took the history 

in North Dakota don’t remember any of it, and these kids are suddenly really interested in history, 

because each building served as a window into it …. My bet is that, if in a year you had the students 

who took the traditional North Dakota history class retake their final, and you compared their 

scores with the downtown Fargo building film makers, the Fargo kids would do as well or better. 

So, I don’t think that just because it’s experiential means no content. 

Kaley Carpenter: So, what, exactly, do you think that colleges and universities should consider 

in admitting students? Do you think personal essays are important? What are some of the 

alternatives? 



Interview: Ted Dintersmith  60 

Ted Dintersmith: I’m a big supporter of a different way to apply to colleges, called the Coalition 

for Access, and in theory it looks at real examples of student work. 

When I was in business, I didn’t care where anybody went to college. I just asked for three writing 

samples that would tell me what I should know about you. I know how long it takes to read those 

writing samples: it does not take very long. And if somebody’s best work that he or she sends you 

isn’t very good, then you know your answer. If it’s really good, then it’s interesting and fun to 

read. I believe that colleges would be better off saying, “Show me you at your best.” It could be a 

critical analysis of literature; it could be interesting interpretations of history. It could be a science 

experiment. It could be a useful application of math. It could be something interdisciplinary. It 

could be an initiative—it could be anything. If the world values young adults for being creative 

and distinctive, then college admissions should value them for creative and distinctive things 

they’ve done, that they’ve cared about, and that they’re proud of.  

But if instead it’s all around AP test scores and SATs and grade point averages, then I think the 

message is: “Crank out a bunch of numbers you’re not very excited about in a process that’s 

required to do well in that task, and that task alone.”  

It really is a question of whether we care more about the data that makes it easy to rank students 

against each other, or whether we care more about powerful, deeper ways to learn and a sense of 

purpose in the education.  

Kaley Carpenter: How would colleges and universities gauge academic ability in STEM fields, 

for instance, without standardized tests? 

Ted Dintersmith: I think the standardized test tell you nothing about STEM abilities. Philip 

Sandler, a tenured professor at Harvard (which most people think is the best school in the world) 

was skeptical that students there or at MIT had learned much useful science or engineering. Now, 

they’ve all taken AP Physics and gotten a five, taken AP Calculus BC and gotten a five, gotten 

800 on their math SATs, and a 4.5 or higher AP-adjusted GPA. They get to MIT, they’re there, 

taking a bunch of engineering courses. To make his point—this is what the video shows6—on 

graduation day, student after student is offered a light bulb a wire and a battery. They’re asked, 

“Can you light up a light bulb with a battery and wire?” And some of the students are indignant. 

But then student after student can’t light up the light bulb with a wire and battery.7 



61  Carpenter 

  

The point that Professor Sandler wanted to make is this: students are memorizing Coulomb’s Law. 

They’re memorizing Kirchhoff’s Law. They’re facile with manipulating algebraic equations, but 

they have no idea how things work in the real world. The same professor said that MIT used to 

take a lot of kids from rural America—the kids who worked on farms—because they actually do 

a lot of great engineering there. If you could take apart a tractor engine, and put it back together, 

then that’s a great leading indicator for being a fabulous engineer. But—back to college 

admissions—while MIT used to accept lots of kids from farms, today they take almost none, 

because those kids aren’t drilling on AP courses and SATs. I think that’s an enormous missed 

opportunity for many, many kids in our country. I think it’s sort of a false signal about what it 

actually means to understand science and engineering issues. So, I’m a big advocate for 

alternative, real-world ways to find meaningful work in this world. If you’re interested in being 

an electrical engineer, then get an internship with a master electrician. Don’t do test prep for the 

AP Physics class. 

Kaley Carpenter: As a counterargument to getting rid of standardized tests, do you think there is 

a way to re-create the tests to be able to evaluate more than just a narrow view of what academic-

readiness is? 

Ted Dintersmith: This gets back to the question of personal essays. You’re trying to get at 

something important, something nuanced. If it’s nuanced, then it’s easy to generate the questions, 

and it’s very hard to grade them. So, let’s start with something fairly simple that you think would 

be a useful indication of a student’s potential: for 12 years, it was the SAT written essay, from 

which came 800 out of the test’s 2400 points. The reality is that it’s actually pretty easy to write 

an essay about something you know. Students would take the essay, and they’d write it with 

proctors in the room. And I think it was actually a really good thing to do.  

The problem was that the SAT and the College Board decided they had to actually give a number 

to that essay. So you think that your essay is going to be graded by some long-term, experienced 

English teacher who’s going to spend thirty minutes on your essay and come up with a really 

nuanced evaluation: “Oh, gosh! I’m agonizing, but this is somewhere between a 685 … and a 705. 

I’m going to give it a 695 and then spend a half an hour on the next one.” 



Interview: Ted Dintersmith  62 

Well, that’s not at all how it’s graded. People have looked into how it’s actually evaluated. What 

did the College Board do? They hired unemployed people off of Craigslist. They were 

compensated by the number of essays they grade per hour. They will tell you that they don’t even 

read the words; they scan them. What do they look for? They look for four to five paragraphs, 

four to five sentences per paragraph, varied sentence structure, and some vocabulary words. If 

you do that, you’re at 750 or higher.  

And people have debunked those tests by having really great writers take them and write pure 

gobbledygook. They write something that’s completely incoherent but with five paragraphs, four-

to-five sentences per paragraph, varied sentence structure, and some unusual vocabulary words. 

Sure enough, they get in the seven hundreds every time. So it’s the grading and the evaluation of 

anything that’s important in life that gets hard. This session is showing us a little bit of what most 

adult organizations say they value: employees who can ask really interesting questions. Well, how 

much of school is around asking really interesting questions? How do you really put a score on 

questions that are interesting? That’s very hard. It’s nuanced. You can have an opinion about 

whether somebody else’s question is interesting, but if you try to turn it into a standardized test, 

it gets very difficult.  

The other issue with the standardized test is the fact that the only way you can standardize it is if 

everybody’s studying the same material to take the same exam, which takes [out] all the ability to 

go deep into something, to explore it in your own way, to be creative. If you talk to any SAT test 

tutor, which I do, there are two big pieces of advice they give out. First, never do anything unusual, 

creative, or out-of-the-box—that’s too risky. Think formulaically, because it’s designed to be 

scored by a computer. So, the advice is to think like a computer. The second piece of advice is: if 

you have a question that’s really hard, or that’s going to take you a long time to figure out, skip 

it. I don’t know, but I think that kind of advice makes for some pretty miserable life lessons. 

Kaley Carpenter: Speaking of those life lessons, especially in our Covid-19 era, how is the 

pandemic changing the way colleges will evaluate students in the future, especially with regard to 

these standardized tests? 

Ted Dintersmith: Fortunately, I think the grip of the SAT and ACT is starting to loosen. I think 

that’s encouraging. The University of California system—UCLA, Berkeley—which gets more 



63  Carpenter 

  

applications in any school in the country (over 100,000 a year) just announced they’re not using 

SATs or ACTs anymore.8  

If, in fact, the world is begging for people who are creative, for people who have distinctive, 

unusual strengths, then that seems to me to be sounding alarm bells about how much we want to 

adhere to a standardized education. College admissions could (1) stop saying they want every 

student to take the same thing in order to compare them, and (2) start saying, “We want students 

who can blow us away with creative distinctive work.”  

The argument against this is that it would cost money. Don’t tell me that that would cost some 

money, because if the future of civil society depends on that, then spend the money. Stop spending 

the millions of dollars dictated by the automatic mailing lists generated from the PSATs for 

sending out all these brochures to get more people to apply so you can turn down more people 

and look more selective. Instead, spend a little bit more money on evaluating real-life examples 

of student ability. Spend admissions money looking more carefully at what students actually 

created, invented, developed, or made happen that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. That’s a 

more authentic way to evaluate a person’s potential.   

But I also think it makes for a more authentic high school experience. I think college admissions 

has a lot of work to do, because they’re not a helpful agent in this process. I think the fastest way 

to change the high school experience today is to have colleges change their application process. 

If colleges said, “We’re looking for X instead of Y,” then K through 12 schools would start doing 

X instead of Y. They could indeed—just like that—change the high school experience. This is 

why I go to great lengths to try to encourage colleges to think about it that way. 

So, I think not only is Covid-19 changing standardized testing, I think it’s going to make a lot of 

people step back and ask, “What is the essence of school? What should we be doing? How should 

we engage with students in their learning? Should we be giving them more voice and leading the 

way, choosing what they want to learn, and evaluating more on creative and different things they 

create instead of taking the same test?” And I think if that happens, then that’s all to the good. 

 
 
 
 



Interview: Ted Dintersmith  64 

Notes 

1. Ted Dintersmith, What Schools Could Be: Insights and Inspiration from Teachers across America 

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). 

2. Ibid., 18. 

3. David Brooks, “Schools for Wisdom,” The New York Times October 16, 2015, https://www. 

nytimes.com/2015/10/16/opinion/schools-for-wisdom.html. 

4. Dintersmith, What Schools Could Be, 70. 

5. Alexandra Tilsley, “Advanced Placement, Not Credit,” Inside Higher Ed January 18, 2013, 

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/01/18/dartmouth-end-use-advanced-placement-

scores-credit.  

6. Matthew Schneps, “Can We Believe Our Eyes,” (Annenberg/CPB Math and Science Project and 

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 1997), https://www.learner.org/series/minds-of-

our-own/1-can-we-believe-our-eyes.  

7. “Improving Math and Science Education So That No Child Is Left Behind,” Hearing Before the 

Subcommittee on Research Committee on Science (House of Representatives, One Hundred 

Seventh Congress, First Session, May 2, 2001), Serial No. 107–27, http://commdocs.house.gov/ 

committees/science/hsy73337.000/hsy73337_0.HTM. In his testimony, Philip Sadler, Ph.D., 

Director of the Science Education Department at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 

describes the television program from which the above video above is excerpted. “Minds of Our 

Own” aired as part of the Center’s television programming on the Annenberg/CPB Channel, with 

the goal of providing professional development for elementary and upper-level science teachers. 

Sadler notes the surprising results from the Center’s interviewing Harvard and MIT students 

regarding their understanding of basic science: “Only half of MIT students when given a light bulb 

and a battery and a piece of wire can make the bulb light up” (31). A second documentary produced 

by Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Annenberg Foundation, “A Private 

Universe,” shows Harvard graduates, faculty, and alums struggling to correctly describe what 

produces the earth’s seasons: Matthew Schneps, “A Private Universe” (Annenberg/CPB Math and 

Science Project and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 1989), https://www.learner.org/ 

series/a-private-universe.  

8. See the school system’s admission page at https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-

requirements/freshman-requirements/exam-requirement/. 

9. Thanks to Margaret Casson, Ryane Farrell, Aidan McInerney, Colt Schnabel, Shannon Smith, and 

Mason Wesley for their assistance with this interview. 


