BHSc administrators held an emergency Wednesday morning meeting to discuss the critical issue of developing novel questions for the program’s supplementary application. “We’ve already used up 20% of the 5 W’s,” announced one attendee. “And last I checked, that list isn’t getting any longer.” The program has been redirecting funds for several years to increase the generation of vague question-like application prompts, yet the results have so far been lackluster.
A number of possible solutions were evaluated in the past application cycle. Though most remained unimplemented, one question about “Bushido” found some success among the faculty after the supp app committee decided to watch The Last Samurai in lieu of holding a planning meeting. Unfortunately, approaches involving cultural references have since been unilaterally banned, after an investigatory committee found that said question was unfairly biased towards the ancient Japanese warrior demographic.
As an interim measure, some faculty have proposed switching around letters of the existing 5 W’s to create fresh prompts which still retained the requisite nebulousness. However, others have responded with criticism. “Most of these new words like “waht” aren’t even charmingly awkward,” noted a faculty member. “And “who” just rearranges to “how”, which is basically one of the 5 W’s already. It is not a good longterm strategy.”
When asked why the program couldn’t simply construct prompts consisting of two or more words, program administrators responded that they wished to “avoid instilling applicants with a biased perspective on how to combine multiple words”. The faculty in question were reportedly debating whether “Whether?” Constituted a grammatically sensible question.
Others have suggested that emoji-based prompts may be the way of the future. “There must be more hipster ways to ask these questions, and we’ve simply not discovered them yet,” said one inquiry facilitator. “Maybe we just need to dig deeper.”
The Procrastinator 