Reflections on the Mirror Stage

I had to wonder, with a call to eliminate the essay along with standardized tests, what's left? Grades and random selection?

Having said that I often felt like it is a better use of everyone's time to have specific questions for applicants, rather than an ambiguous statement for an applicant to guess at what the committee is looking for, while the committee interprets that guesswork as a stimulus-free projective test. The committee gets to be straightforward about the types of questions they want to ask, and the applicants doesn't have to play the guess-the-committee game quite as much.