<p>And did this person tell you what is meant by “most successful?”
Converting raw genius is nice. Is it the mission of the elite colleges? Not do you think it should be, but is it?
This is not the Feynman era. Today’s elite U values have broadened. We ran over and over him as an example, what? two years ago?</p>
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<p>lol, anyone who tried to juggle my cat would actually be exposing himself to injury. :D</p>
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<p>I’m not convinced all that many parents are actually doing that. One might get that impression by spending a lot of time on CC, but this is a pretty small microcosm.</p>
<p>Every field has “magical geniuses” in waiting. That is not unique to Feynman or physics. Most people in literature, the arts, music, engineering, science, politics, social sciences, education, medicine. etc. don’t truly reveal the extent of their gifts as teenagers! There are of course prodigies but that can happen in any field. And kids that peak early don’t always go on to do great things. I honestly don’t get the obsession with MIT and Feynman. </p>
<p>Pizzagirl, it is simplistic to say “well, if you don’t like it, just go somewhere else.” That wouldn’t be a productive response to someone voicing a complaint about American foreign policy, and it isn’t any more reasonable when we apply it to college admissions; I can like lots and lots of things about a college and still think that some of its priorities are misplaced - or, alternatively, I could NOT like a college because of what I see as warped priorities, and still think it is better than others that may have similar problems without offering compensatory advantages. Frankly, for someone who is hinting at diagnoses for other posters, you’re engaging in some pretty black and white thinking yourself. </p>
<p>I can probably count on one hand the number of posters I’ve encountered on CC that actually believe we should admit purely on test scores and GPA. Certainly, QM isn’t one of them. But I don’t think there is anything outrageous about the belief - a valid one, based on what I’ve seen and heard – that top college admissions is a little too tilted in favor of non-academic factors. Past a certain point, all of us are just guessing when it comes to how adcoms really weigh various factors. But to the extent that holistic admissions does operate in this way, I don’t like the idea that once applicants pass a certain academic threshold, then its just a matter of taking a few kids who are good at math, and a few who are good at English, and a few who are heavily involved in volunteering and a few who are talented actors and a few to replace the graduating seniors on the softball team with all of these qualities being considered equal. Call me old-fashioned, but I think that in an institution ostensibly dedicated to higher learning, excellence in traditional academic subjects should be weighted more heavily than excellence in other areas. That doesn’t mean that the other qualities aren’t weighted at all, and since I set the bar for that level of really extraordinary academic excellence fairly high, I don’t think my ideal class would look radically different from that of adcoms - but if, for argument’s sake, they admit ten percent of the class primarily on academic grounds, I might make it twenty. That doesn’t mean I think that it is a tragedy if some of those students have to settle for slightly “lesser” colleges under the current system, but I don’t see why they should have to.</p>
<p>At the same time, QM - and we’ve had this discussion before – while I agree with you in principle, I’m not sure if you’re right about the extent to which the real academic superstars actually are being left out under the current model. Again, I might think that more kids should be admitted for academic reasons, but I really do believe that the students scoring 1200 out of 800, to use your metaphor, are getting admitted the schools of their choice pretty consistently. I know in past threads you’ve brought up a couple of individual cases in which you feel that didn’t happen, and not knowing the students involved, I can’t say whether or not I’d agree with your assessment. As a rule, however, I think the future Richard Feynmens can already go to pretty much any school they wish. What I suspect is happening in the case of a place like MIT is rather than while at almost any other school, not only the 1200 out of 800 but the 1000 out of 800 is going to be an auto-admit, there are so many math superstars at MIT that the threshold gets raised - which stinks for a lot of very talented math students who want to go to MIT, but is still not leaving students of demonstrated genius out in the cold.</p>
<p>There are plenty of kids great in math out there. Not all of them want to go to MIT.</p>
<p>The research talent and money in this country is deep, however. I think we can agree that Feynman would have gone to a top grad school for physics if he had gone to any decent research university for undergrad. Saying that Feynman wouldn’t have been Feynman if he had only worked with National-Academy-of-Science-level profs rather than Nobel-level profs as an undergrad is a bit ridiculous, however.</p>
<p>Mind you, I don’t like how the admissions process at many schools can be gamed, but the great thing about our system is that you don’t need to go to any particular set of schools to succeed.</p>
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<p>Really?! I have seen gobs of them. They show up every April.</p>
<p>Sure Feynman would have gone to a top grad school. But how much one’s undergraduate experiences figure into one’s later thinking is a topic for serious educational research. The undergrad years are sufficiently formative that I hypothesize that the level of the undergrad institution does have some impact on later accomplishment. The admissions practices of the top grad schools could also be a topic for serious educational research.</p>
<p>I don’t think Feynman would have proven the Hellmann-Feynman theorem without Slater’s influence, even though some think that Slater just told Feynman how important the result Feynman had already obtained was. I think Slater’s teaching laid the groundwork for Feynman to derive the result.</p>
<p>The [purely hypothetical] score of 1200 on the SAT I math section would be seven standard deviations above the mean. That’s pretty rarefied. I don’t think MIT actually has lots of such people–although there is a suggestion that the top end of the talent distribution is a log-normal distribution rather than a normal (Gaussian) distribution, so maybe there are more than a Gaussian distribution would predict. I think the evidence is not really in on this. </p>
<p>Re sevmom #302: Of course, there are potential magical geniuses in every field, whose talents could be refined by contact with experienced genius. I hope they are all admitted to schools where their talents can flourish. I hope a magical genius historian won’t bother with MIT at all. (Maybe for history of science.)</p>
<p>There is a view that bright students can take care of themselves. This view is also widespread in pre-college education. I am not sure whether it is true. Several other countries put more effort into cultivating the talents of very bright students pre-college than the US does. </p>
<p>I am ambivalent about this. There is only so much money in the public school system, and the available funds need to go where they are most needed. This generally cuts out extra support for bright students. On the other hand, it would not be good in my opinion if only students whose families can afford private pre-college education have access to excellent educations for the very bright. I realize that many private schools offer scholarships, but there are quite a few high school students who would be better served by staying at home rather than boarding, and who don’t live in locales with really good private day schools.</p>
<p>I think that whether genius flourishes regardless of circumstances is open to research. There are a few historical counter-examples (Galois would be one).</p>
<p>MIT math scores are going to be great. This is not news. I’m not too impressed with your throwing around terms like “Gaussian distribution.” Any profession can throw around theories, buzzwords , data ,etc. . How do you even get to seven standard deviations above the mean?</p>
<p>"But I don’t think there is anything outrageous about the belief - a valid one, based on what I’ve seen and heard – that top college admissions is a little too tilted in favor of non-academic factors. "</p>
<p>Using SATs as a measure, the 25/75 percentiles are amazingly, breathtakingly high. I just don’t think there’s much danger that gobs of students being admitted to elite schools are “non-academic.”</p>
<p>And if indeed these top schools are supposedly “non-academic,” where are their bright and undeserving rejects winding up? They don’t just disappear. </p>
<p>“There is a view that bright students can take care of themselves. This view is also widespread in pre-college education. I am not sure whether it is true. Several other countries put more effort into cultivating the talents of very bright students pre-college than the US does.”</p>
<p>But no!! The bright student who winds up at CMU instead of MIT isn’t being hung out to dry, or left out in the woods. He’s still going to have outstanding professors and plenty of resources. This is not at all analogous to, say, the bright kid in the ghetto who IS being hung out to dry and fend for himself. </p>
<p>Re apprenticeprof’s recent post: I think we are generally in agreement. With regard to your final paragraph in #303, I don’t know. I don’t have the data to make any assessment. </p>
<p>It seems to me that lookingforward’s admissions philosophy would leave some of the superstars out, because once they were stamped “academically qualified,” attention would turn to their other characteristics, and the “academically qualified” bar isn’t set especially high. For the most part, it appears to me that the bonus points for clearing the bar handily are pretty limited.</p>
<p>In “top school” admissions, lookingforward’s philosophy prevails over mine. No question about that.</p>
<p>MIT and Feynman are just intended as specific instantiations of a larger issue. I happen to know a fair amount about both, so for me they serve as useful examples. </p>
<p>Also, Feynman was a really interesting person, and I think he is in contention with J. W. Gibbs for the label of “greatest American-born scientist to date.”</p>
<p>Most people are probably sick of Feynman by this point, but in case anyone is not, I recommend the following non-physics books:
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (The original book of anecdotes)
What Do You Care What Other People Think?
Tuva or Bust!
Genius (by James Gleick)
No Ordinary Genius (by Feynman himself and Christopher Sykes–I never said he was modest!)
The Beat of a Different Drum (by Jagdish Mehra); this one is the most scholarly of the set.</p>
<p>Sure, in some fields, CMU is preferable to Harvard or MIT. In some fields, it isn’t. In my particular field, the profs at CMU are quite good, but the profs at Harvard and Stanford are better. </p>
<p>I don’t mean to insult anyone in my field at CMU–they really are very good. But hardly any faculty member turns down an offer from Harvard or Stanford. Faculty move to Harvard and Stanford at all ages, when “called”–these schools pretty much have their pick. The only exception to this statement would apply to people with multiple faculty offers at top schools (e.g., Caltech and Princeton might be preferable to H or S in some areas), or people with specific geographic restrictions.</p>
<p>I’m not trying to impress anyone with the term “Gaussian distribution,” sevmom. SAT scoring is based on the idea that the scores will fit a Gaussian distribution with a mean pretty close to 500 and a standard deviation pretty close to 100. It’s useful to know something about Gaussian distributions when thinking about SAT scores. AP Statistics covers this topic. </p>
<p>But who are these “superstars” that you’re concerned about? My younger kid graduated from high school with a kid who had 2400 on his SAT’s, rejected by MIT and got off a waitlist for an HYP school. My very bright late bloomer kid went to a state school for engineering and graduated magna cum laude. They are working at the same place now that they have graduated from college.</p>
<p>Adding to #313: Others who might not move to H or S when “called” include people who really like their colleagues, the research infrastructure, or the physical environment at the school where they are (CMU or other).</p>
<p>Well, my H went to CMU and turned down an acceptance to Yale to do so, But that was for undergrad and he was interested in engineering. Didn’t apply to MIT but had the stats to do so. As did S1 who had no interest in schools like MIT. </p>
<p>QM, I have asked you to please not try to speak for me.</p>
<p>Approf, if someone asked me what percentage of the class I thought was admitted with strong respect for their academics, I think I might answer 90%. What divides some on this sort of thread is that it’s not about these academic strengths alone. You can ask for that and personal attributes. You can’t get into an elite without the intellectual (except some athletes) and there would be no point, no satisfaction, in admitting some large % of the class that couldn’t manage, wouldn’t even have the platform, just because, say, they are great volunteers. Leave that to another school.</p>
<p>I don’t see why some CC-ers can’t imagine this as a matrix of factors. People seem to want to organize “these” elements as more valuable and “those” as lesser. Why can’t the schools look for a combination? </p>
<p>In the great scheme of things, it doesn’t matter all that much whether you go to MIT or CMU. Once we exclude considerations of vanity, it matters even less. But in the small scheme of things in which it matters at least a little, the students who are going to feel those small differences are precisely the very top academic types of the kind that QM is talking about.</p>
<p>To move to the humanities for a second, if you’re a very bright but not super intellectual community service type who decided to major in English, it probably doesn’t matter to you one whit whether or not your school offered an undergraduate course on Ulysses, or whether your Victorian Lit survey taught Middlemarch or The Mill on the Floss (both are by George Eliot; the former is a far longer, but also a far better novel). On the other hand, the option of taking on some more advanced texts at the undergraduate level may be very attractive to the serious literature student. </p>
<p>“The [purely hypothetical] score of 1200 on the SAT I math section would be seven standard deviations above the mean. That’s pretty rarefied. I don’t think MIT actually has lots of such people–although there is a suggestion that the top end of the talent distribution is a log-normal distribution rather than a normal (Gaussian) distribution, so maybe there are more than a Gaussian distribution would predict. I think the evidence is not really in on this.”</p>
<p>@QuantMech -</p>
<p>I find myself fascinated by this idea. I totally agree that the SAT I and indeed the SAT II (in math, at least) are poor indicators once above, say, 780 of where someone really is. What kinds of kids would be in that top 7-sigma band? Are you thinking kids who make it to the AIME? Kids who make it to the USAMO? Kids who score non-zero on the USAMO?</p>
<p>My DS16 told me that the numbers do work out such that all kids who get non-zero USAMO scores could be included, with room to spare, in MIT’s stated “200 or so” that they let in under the “academic superstar” category per their admissions blog. OTOH, at least a couple posters on CC claim to be such kids who were denied from MIT, so who knows.</p>
<p>When I went to MIT, I was told by the admissions person we met on a visit (maybe Marilee?) that they did an admissions count on two scales of 5, one for academic and one for “personal” which also included attributes like URM that they wished to increase. My understanding is that this is no longer done as openly or quantitatively.</p>
<p>Also, for all of MIT’s alleged efforts to be more holistic, I’m a HS teacher and I see that all the kids who get admitted to MIT from my HS (4-5 per year) are indeed kind of…nerdy…and what I might have expected for MIT even when I attended back in the olden days.</p>
<p>In fact, one of my very favorite (though of course I don’t have favorites) students, who aced all kinds of Math Team things and was a girl incredibly skilled in fife (!) and some varsity sports and who had community service, etc. - was denied. She went to Wellesley and is now a math teacher, but I always thought that she would have been the ideal MIT person.</p>
<p>Her best friend, who was objectively “less interesting” but who had slightly higher scores and a few more APs, did go to MIT and probably did fine too, though I’ve not kept up with her. Yes, I know, anecdotes are not data, but I don’t think mathy geniuses are in general losing out, even if the prize is viewed as being MIT - while some kids who would do great there, unfortunately don’t get in, as is true of any one of these stellar colleges where they get several times as many qualified applicants as places.</p>