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uniformly excellent teacher recommendations cannot weed out the good and bad.
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"Uniformly excellent" == average
There will be recommendations that will stand out because they will display the candidate's intellectual passion (as opposed to mugging and doing well because society told them to).
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parents would keep themselves away from the essays?
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Such actions would destroy the "voice" of those essays ... just as parent intervention also tends to backfire in college essays.
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these kids have every right to enter the top schools if they're qualified, regardless of how.
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Ah, but what is qualified? The very idea of "gifted" is about aptitude and talent, not just current performance or mere grades. Current performance is the y, not the y'; I should believe that the student whose mugging-based performance has been egged on by society, as opposed to a student who takes charge of his/her learning, is not qualified.