Over recent decades, Bard, which charges $45,730 for tuition, has developed a reputation as a college proudly out of step with the times. In an era when many institutions are promoting professional training, Bard encourages broad intellectual experimentation. Its faculty attracts many celebrated scholars and artists, foremost among them Dr. Botstein himself, who when not consumed with his work as a president or a scholar has traveled the world as an orchestral conductor.

This is not Bard’s first attempt to shake up the admissions process. In 1978, it began inviting applicants to campus for a day of academic seminars and meetings with admissions officers. Within two days, the students, who must also submit standard application materials, are informed of their fate. That avenue will remain in place, as will the common application, a more conventional form used by over 400 colleges. There is no set number of how many students will be admitted through each method.

Jim Rawlins, who just ended his tenure as president of the admissions counselors group, said many colleges experiment with the admissions formula, but few quite this drastically. “I really do think we’ve heard about every scenario,” he said. “But every once in a while we go, Wow, haven’t heard that one before.”

Bard’s audition is open book: Along with the menu of 17 questions, the college’s Web site will provide all the relevant source materials — from a Nobel lecture about prion disorders to the United Nations Charter to an Aeschylus play — with which to address them. (Additional research is permitted if properly documented.) Mary Backlund, Bard’s director of admission, said that that access will place students who may not have encountered the subjects in school or do not have good local libraries on equal footing with those who attended elite high schools.

Nicholas Lemann, the author of “The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy,” a book about the SAT, warned that solely merit-based admissions standards were all but impossible to create. “I appreciate the incredible appeal, especially to Americans, of canceling out background factors,” he said, “but it can’t be done if you’re looking at people at that age on basically educational credentials.”