lizzardfire

Caltech is hard enough that I think anyone who can be scared away by my depictions of its difficulty would probably not be able to handle it. This isn't always true, but I'd much rather accidentally scare off one person that could handle Caltech than not scare off one person who couldn't. The reason? Someone who can perform well at Caltech will be just fine academically at Stanford, MIT, Harvard, etc. They will easily be able to challenge themselves. Someone who can't perform well here and ends up here, though, is in for a world of trouble.

T-bird

well, how hard is hard? You mention in your open letter that the admissions committee will only admit students who can handle the work, but I guess we're talking about mistakes the admissions committee makes - or do I misunderstand you?

CalTech's application asks for the following things:
Grades/scores
Recommendations
Essays

Just from that, it seems like as long as one has top grades/scores (and teacher recommendations say that you're smart/work hard), and the essays seem to fit in with CalTech's culture, then one has a decent chance of admission. How would the admissions committee be able to judge whether or not you're ready to handle the workload at CalTech based on anything other than top test scores and grades, assuming teacher recs correlate with the rest of the application? I think it's probably accurate to say that not everyone with a 2400/36 and 4.0 is going to be able to handle CalTech's workload, so what things do you think distinguish someone who could succeed at CalTech from someone who couldn't? And how would the admissions committee see that on the application?

lizzardfire

You do misunderstand me, but I can see how what I'm trying to say is not very clear.

Basically I'm saying in the open letter that anyone can handle this place academically... meaning, they are academically prepared enough to handle the rigors at Tech. Admissions doesn't really have a way of determining how well you're able to handle a stressful situation or furthermore how much you like it. There are plenty of people that, while they could technically handle the workload here, wouldn't enjoy it very much.

T-bird

Thanks for clarifying. I think I see what you're saying now. :3

Respectfully

This has been a great thread. Thanks for all the insight.

I applied EA to MIT and I'm applying RD to CalTech, but we'll see what type of decision I have to make in the future.