Morty discussed the issue of intellectual vitality. He pitched this, not so much as a way to somehow identify kids with some sort of spark — see my previous discussion — but as a method for avoiding punishing kids who “take chances.” Let’s say you have two students, both with similar academic profiles. But one of the students took an academic chance [say, started studying a new language in 11th grade] and got a bad grade. Right now, the system favors the student who does not take that chance, who just studies the things that he is good at. Morty doesn’t like that. He wants to, at least, not penalize the student who studies something out of her comfort zone. He implied, but did not make clear, that he even wanted to favor such chance taking, all else equal. He mentioned that a very large number (80?) of the students in the class of 2012 had a intellectual vitality (”IV”) tag.

But Morty admitted that he did not know if their attempts to identify intellectual vitality were working. And, being an empirical economist (a phrase he used multiple times), he wanted to study it. Specifically, he mentioned supervising an honors student in doing this research. It was not clear if he had already selected a student. If you are a rising senior who has ever even thought about graduate school in economics (whatever your current major at Williams), you would be an idiot not to consider contacting Morty right now about working with him on this.