We’ve seen the considerable talents of Georgetown students immortalized in video before: from Ben Shaw and Matt Appenfeller’s powers of satire and pulling off fake mustaches to Arman Ismail’s Joker impression to Jon Deutsch’s Georgetown Forever. But this year at Tufts University, video-literate potential students get to submit their masterpieces as part of their admissions packet.

Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Lee Coffin told the New York Times that he had the idea to let students supplement their admissions essays with videos when he was watching a particularly good YouTube video.

“I thought, ‘If this kid applied to Tufts, I’d admit him in a minute, without anything else,’ ” he said.

Tufts put the word out that applicants could include a one-minute video that “says something about you” (in addition to their answers to some rather outre admissions questions, like, “Are we alone?” and “Create something out of a piece of paper”), and now, over 1,000 out of the 15,000 applicants to Tufts have included videos.

NYT highlighted some of the best. There’s Betty Quinn’s awesome stop-motion video, shown above, Amelia Downs’s Math Dance, Michale Klinker’s demonstration of the remote-controlled, flying version of “Jumbo the Elephant,” Tufts’s mascot, and Shelby Listokin’s rap through a wired-shut mouth.

Quinn’s and Klinker’s videos especially are great examples of how video allows applicants to show off talents that they couldn’t, necessarily, in an essay.

Vox thinks this is a delightful idea—and a way better use of YouTube to enhance a university than the horribly hard-to-watch “Why I Chose Yale.”

Sex free’s the way to be!

Being an amorous college student is hard enough at Georgetown, what with the lack of condom vendors and the whole Catholic morality complex, but we may have been one-upped on the preventing sex front—and by a secular school at that!

This year, Tufts University administrators revamped the school’s guest policy and added a clause that forbids “[engaging] in sexual activity while your roommate is present in the room.”  The new policy also says that an sexual acts should not interfere with a roommate’s privacy, sleep, or study habits.

Legislating common decency?  Perhaps, but Tufts administrators say new rules are a response to frequent complaints from roommates who had been put in “uncomfortable” situations or sexiled.

Of course, Tufts’ new rules aren’t all that much more intense than Georgetown’s.  Our Code of Student Conduct [PDF] states, “Cohabitation, which is defined as overnight visits with a sexual partner, is incompatible both with the Catholic character of the University and with the rights of the roommates.”  (No word on the University’s position on non-sleepover sexual activities, though).