Have you been following the changing shape of the college admissions process? Recently, a New York Times article highlighting today’s practices cited Goucher College’s willingness to accept a student-created video in place of a high school transcript. Video is an interesting choice. When Derek Jeter played his final home game, my nine year old seemed to be filming the entire event on our iPad. We kept telling him he was wasting space, and he would just nod and assure us that he planned to make cuts. We didn’t know until the next morning what he meant; he used iMovie to make a really powerful tribute trailer about Jeter, complete with framing notes and credits. Composing in video is truly as easy as drawing with a crayon—and it’s a medium with which many of my son’s generation feel completely comfortable. Eight years from now, when this kid is applying to college, perhaps video will be a way for him to show something of who he is, and who he could be as a student. Not long ago I heard about a tiny non-profit that is attempting to marry video and college admissions in a totally different way. Reading Portfolio (readingportfolio.com/; still in Beta) wants to make wide and deep reading a verifiable and valued part of how a student defines and presents him/herself. Their idea is to offer students a list of important fiction and nonfiction titles and tape them taking a 10-minute quiz about the books. Students can then include these videos as part of their college applications. I’m sure you have considered some of the same hazards that I did: Which books, how selected? What is the quiz? To my eyes, the current quiz relies too heavily on identify-and-define questions, or 11th-grade Accelerated Reading, which is not what Reading Portfolilo has in mind. A deep reader, who may not recall one character’s name, might have a great deal to say about his/her own personal associations and be able to offer a number of weighty reflections on the book. I’ve communicated some of these concerns to the eager folks behind Reading Portfolio, and they are quite open to suggestions. And that is because they are readers, and have posed an important question: why is it that high school athletes know to create a highlight reel (doubtless a professional-looking one), while readers have no tool to show colleges the depth of their engagement with books? What if the test portion of a reading portfolio also included space to show an entirely personal response to a book—a trailer, a poem, psychological insights, revisions of standard histories, or philosophical questions prompted by the text. I can see the need to establish that a student has indeed read the book—but that would appear to be the baseline, the foundation. The real question is where the experience took the reader, how did the s/he engage with the book? If we could find a way to record impassioned reading, it could communicate quite a lot to colleges. Librarians could offer film sessions in the library—a kind of a StoryCorps for readers—with the idea that as they develop skills taping their book encounters, they would be building a college reading portfolio. What do you think?