pebbles

You'd think, though, that with such faulty admissions policies, MIT would cease to be such a math/science powerhouse... its blatantly weak student body really should have no business sweeping the Putnam competition.

beefs

lol true thye always win putnam

PwnzDeLeOwnz

Read what the OP said Pebbles.


While I don't agree that MIT Admissions have become a Complete Joke, I do agree that if a college favors certain applicants than it will have a less talented student body. By favoring applicants and not awarding spots in a class based solely off merit, you will inevitably have a "weaker" class. Of course there are positives in an admissions process like MIT's, but one has to judge whether or not these positives ("Increased Diversity", Better Male:Female ratio, and others) make up for a less "talented" student body.

MIT definitely has an extremely talented student body, I'm not arguing that. Even though it has one of smartest student bodies, the OP is just expressing his opinion that he thinks the positives of a less merit based admissions policy don't justify straying away from solely merit based admissions policy. I agree with him here , but I wouldn't go so far as to call MIT admissions a complete joke. After all who doesn't like a good M/F ratio?

molliebatmit

The last time we all gathered together to have a pointless, flame-filled argument like this one (well, maybe not the last time -- it's hard to keep track), I made the point that it would be nice to be able to stick a thermometer in everybody's head and measure exactly how much merit is in there, but unfortunately, it's not possible.

I understand that an SAT score is made of numbers and therefore looks concrete and objective, but it's not possible to make a culture-neutral test. Basing admission solely on SAT scores may look terribly meritocratic, but you're going to be missing people who don't test well but have a lot of merit in their brains anyway. By decreasing emphasis on a test in an already talented applicant pool, the admissions office is trying to pick up those people who would be falsely passed over in a test-only system.

Here's my question: If MIT is truly admitting less-qualified women and minorities, then why do those "unqualified" students succeed at MIT? Why do the women graduate at higher rates than the men, who are supposedly more qualified? Why do minority students choose to major in more difficult departments than other groups at MIT?

pebbles

No, MY challenge is, show me how the class is "weaker" than it used to be. How it is in your words, "less talented". I've never seen any evidence to that effect and I think one thing the admissions department prides itself on, here, is the ability to do what you think is impossible, to build a healthy learning environment as WELL as maintain the level of the student body. Admissions is a harder job than just lining people up in order of their SAT scores, I think.

In my opinion the strange way that America some how seems to lead the world in talent output is largely due to its experimental system of college admissions and education. I say experimental because it is employed in no other country with which I am familiar. I recently gave a little talk in a Chinese school to that effect. Why fix what isn't broken? What would be our incentive to make reverse progress and backtrack to a selection system of ranks and numbers and grades?

Knowmsayin?

PwnzDeLeOwnz

First of all, in my post I never described women and minorities as either unqualified or qualified. I think most if not all of the admitted students at MIT are certainly qualified to graduate and "Succeed" at MIT. My point was if you actively try to get a certain demographic into your school (and by actively I mean making admissions easier for that demographic), then you'll certainly end up with a less talented class. I never talked about SAT scores as an objective measure of merit either, although I think they are useful to a degree.


Honestly, not sure . Although I think there are too many factors involved to actually draw a strong conclusion from this.

PwnzDeLeOwnz

I personally think the difference in MIT's student body as of now compared to a student body composed under a purely merit based admissions wouldn't be very large. I have no evidence to back up my claims other than just logic. This is the way I think about it:
-An institution wants to enroll "talented" students but at the same time wants a "healthy mix" of students.
-Say we have two students, student A and student B.
-Student A is slightly more talented than student B. (Of course you can't quantify talent, but if you put the two students side by side and look at their GPAs, SATs, Classes Taken, Extracurriculars, Accomplishments, and other factors you can be reasonably sure that a student is more talented than the other.)
-Student B gets in because of some form of preferential treatment.

My point is if you have different standards of admissions for different demographics you will have a less talented student body, because situations like the one above (which I don't think is unreasonable) will occur.


@ Pebbles, I don't think MIT's admissions are broken. I'm merely trying to argue that preferential treatment results in a less talented student body. I really think there is a difference, and that it can't be ignored- it may be somewhat negligible but to say it doesn't exist is what I'm trying to argue against.

Sklog_W

Man, I'm going to thank God everyday that MIT decided to suck it up and have a "less talented" admissions pool then, because as far as I can tell they're looking out for their students when they run admissions like they do. I certainly can't speak for every MIT student, but I for one know for a fact I would be miserable at this place if they didn't decide to run admissions with a bit of subjectivity. Honestly, I don't care if the kid next to me got a 2400 on the SATs or if he's a hobo who wandered into the institute and got handed an acceptance letter, if he's someone who I'd like to hang out with I really don't mind how he got here or what his merits are.

But hey, maybe other people do care that everyone on campus is 100% qualified for their view of MIT standards, I don't know.

Mikalye

The purpose of the MIT admissions process, and indeed that of Harvard, is to try to figure out who the people are that are applying. It has long been recognised that there is a disconnect between the application folder and the individual. I have met some very, very bright applicants who I knew were going to be rejected because of the image that they were trying to project to MIT. The fact of the matter is that MIT is highly competitive, and that you cannot really afford to blow any section of the application.

I have interviewed candidates who clearly were just having a bad day. Clearly it is unfair that a lifetime of attentive study and application can be blown in one bad day when you throw up on the interviewer's rug, but hey, it can happen, and life isn't fair.

I have met many, many people who are great on paper and useless in real life and vice versa. MIT goes a long way towards trying to get past the paper, sometimes mistakes may be made, but over all, very few of them.

hedoya

To Mit's credit if someone had started this post on the Princeton board all of the Princeton ringers would have circled and gotten the person booted as a troll. MIT is very transparent and loaded with super smart kids- been there seen it. MIT is no cake walk.

PwnzDeLeOwnz

I'm not criticizing MIT's admissions process. In fact MIT was one of my dream schools (the other being Caltech). I just want people to recognize that *using preferential treatment* has a negative aspect to it. Sklog_W and Mikalye, you both missed my point completely. My responses aren't about whether or not MIT's admissions policies are good or bad. Sklog_W, please read my posts before you decide to comment.

pebbles

Okay, let's look at your logic. It's impossible to number 1-15000 the applicant pool in terms of talent but it's okay to compare any two: Makes sense.

Okay, we're on the same page here. This is true. At least I think.

Okay, yep.

Um... this is where the problem starts. I have a couple of objections. Student A is a Nationally Ranked Violinist who composes and plays in several symphony orchestras. He has been playing from a very young age. Student B is exceedingly devoted to community service, and has been traveling the world working as a volunteer for Habitat for Humanity.

Will student A be more successful as a biologist or student B? 17 is a VERY young age to be judged so minutely.

But for argument's sake let's say that holds. OKAY. Mr. PwnzDeleOwnz the Senior Admissions officer has decided that Student A is "a LITTLE more talented" than Student B. Maybe he went to his concert.

Wait, why does Student A have to be rejected? The way college admissions works is that every person is compared against the POOL of applicants, not against ONE other student. Who says that preferential treatment for student B guarantees that a MORE talented student A is rejected in its stead? Couldn't a LESS talented student be rejected? Well, no, because there are a certain number of students MORE talented than student B and in order to take Student B one of them must be rejected, therefore reducing the talent of the admitted body right? Well, in order for that logic to hold we have to know every person who is 'more talented' than a particular individual in the applicant pool, aren't we back to ranking students again and didn't we say that that was impossible?


MY point is that it's impossible to make a statement like 'preferential treatment results in a less talented student body' without proposing that admissions is about lining students up and taking numbers 1-1500. If the process did involve something like that, exactly 1500 would be admitted each year, which is simply not true :/

EDIT. okay i started drafting this a while ago and i hit the submit button like 40 minutes later and there were all these posts. I don't mean to attack you, Pwnz(...), I really would hate for you to feel ganged up on. I'm merely exploring the question that you put out there. I hope you are not offended in any way.

o0CrazyGlue0o

A white kid from my school got accepted to MIT two years ago with a 1420 SAT, 3.69 GPA, and no science/math ECs that I knew of. He was good at football though. The other ECs he had listed on the yearbook were nothing impressive at all. Me on the otherhand, i scored a 1560, have a 4.2 GPA, aced my APs and SAT IIs, did a bunch of science related ECs in and out of school in addition to some noncompetitive tennis and viola. I ended up getting waitlisted. I did get into stanford and caltech, and I know there were people with much more impressive stats who also didnt get in, so I cant really complain. But I do think that MIT should try to be more like caltech and less like Harvard in its admissions. Honestly, whats MIT trying to do by recruiting athletes? Win the NCAA? An "Institute of Technology" should select students based on their potential in science and engineering, and not on irrelevant talents that will somehow contribute to "diversity." But hey, MIT can run their own admissions the way they want to.

PwnzDeLeOwnz

I pretty much agree with everything you said pebbles, although I think that while you can't rank applicants from 1-1500 you can most certainly distinguish between them. You don't necessarily need a lining up of students from 1-1500, but I think people can and do mentally categorize applicants with respect to quality. You're right about an applicant competing against a pool rather than a specific person, my example fails in that respect. If you can categorize applicants than you can say that an average student who was a URM got in over an above average student, and in that sense you are giving up "talent" as defined by the categories. At least that's the way I think about it.

It's hard for me to agree because I've seen a case where a wealthy URM with mediocre stats and nothing special is accepted over a kid who won many math competitions, went to ISEF, had amazing scores, was universally considered a genius and a good guy, and was an amazing writer. I know you aren't supposed to compare people with people but rather a person vs the applicant pool; but it's hard for me to believe that accepting the URM over the other applicant wouldn't detract from the talent in the student body. To be honest this argument isn't going anywhere, so I'm just going to drop it.


Pebbles and Molliebatmit, thank you for actually responding to my posts.

LauraN

Oh, I see. So by knowing that we make an effort to accept a balanced class you know that the MIT student body is less talented, and you think that an SAT score is sufficient for judging a person's ability to succeed, but when we have actual data indicating that women do better than men at MIT, NOW there are just too many factors.