Harvard's Impossible Personality Test

Every year, Harvard’s admissions officers are charged with whittling a batch of 40,000 applicants down to a bare-bones selection to fill the institution’s roughly 1,600 freshman seats. Those officers can’t just set a high bar for test scores and GPAs to arrive at that selection; far too many candidates boast those qualifications. Plus, even if that arithmetic were possible, Harvard prides itself as an institution where students learn from each other in addition to their professors. Building each freshman class is, in turn, both an art and a science—one that effectively requires admissions officers to exercise a combination of number-crunching and intuition.

An organization representing Asian Americans who were at some point rejected from Harvard is suing the school for that art-and-science approach. The group, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), recently reignited tensions around that approach with a new legal filing that it says confirms suspicions that the university’s admissions practices discriminate on the basis of race. The , filed on Friday in federal court by SFFA, could influence admissions policies at universities across