The Bial Dale College Adaptability Index is a new college admissions tool designed by Deborah Bial, Ed.D. for her doctoral work at Harvard University. In her continuing study, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, she is tracking students already scored by the new tool and scoring new cohorts of students each year. The new tool is intended to identify student traits and characteristics that standardized tests might miss.
The assessment tool was designed in the summer of 1999 and since then has been used to score more than 800 students from New York City public high schools and over 5,000 from Washington state public schools. In May 2004 and May 2005, the first cohorts of students participating in the study completed their fourth years of college. We are currently analyzing graduation and persistence rates for all students.
In 2000, the Washington Education Foundation hired Bial to use the new tool each year to help screen applicants for their Washington State Achievers Scholarships.
We hope that this tool will eventually help promote fairer policies and strategies for assessing students as colleges and universities and other educational organizations work to address issues of diversity and equity.