<p>@QuantMech:</p>
<p>Are you saying that there are kids who scored on the USAMO who applied to all of Caltech+MIT+HYPS and got shut out of all of them? Where did they go instead?</p>
<p>QM, you are parsing words again. So, it comes across as it doesnât seem to matter to you, whether this kid showed his stuff- only the words used. ? </p>
<p>And of course, once the kids is academically âqualifiedâ in terms of stats, there IS more academic matter to look for- what else did he do that can be shown, besides the numbers and course levels. Did he go off and work with researchers, did he hold some responsibilities on a project, did he use (and test) his interests and talents? Or not?</p>
<p>My viewpoint is that they should automatically assume that each person has something more than simple academics to bring to the table.</p>
<p>well, what if I said, they do- and then go looking for evidence?</p>
<p>Not âassume.â Thatâs grossly unfair to the pool. This isnât lower school where every kid should be given a chance to shine, the understanding that his outbursts can be outgrown, a shiny star for every effort. You canât assume this kidâs stats would hypothetically have been higher. They are what they are.</p>
<p>You want them to assume a kid must have âmoreâ because he did get good scores and so âprobablyâ did more, âlikelyâ has just what the college wantsâŠeven though he wasnât savvy enough to get it on the one format, the application? Maybe he âdidnât know?â Or maybe he didnât think it mattered? Maybe, he misunderstood? But we somehow âknowâ itâs there? Because, after all, all kids are good kids??? </p>
<p>How far does it go? He never joined a club, but we just knowww lil Johnny must be a leader someway, somehow, because, all kids have something special? This is where I think people need to be more rational.</p>
<p>Go ook at a sew of applications, see what either comes through or doesnât. Care as much about the kids who did strive and took care to show it on their apps. See the difference in thinking that kids can manifest. Or not.</p>
<p>@lookingforward - I have a specific question about the âleadershipâ angle for these applications.</p>
<p>I was reflecting the other day that as adults, we donât normally exercise leadership by being elected (ok, for most of us, we donât). Instead, we organize/inspire/improve/gather people and processes in helpful ways. Is that a reasonable kind of âleadershipâ for a kid to show in an application as well? Would it âcountâ as much as being Captain of XYZ?</p>
<p>Q, continued: </p>
<p>No matter how much you wish, no matter how golden your heart is, this is not an open Yea or Nay process- ie, all the bright, qualified kids get to go to MIT or Harvard or Stanford. Itâs not saying a kid isnât worthy, IRL. They can take 5%. They have to cull through for the ones they think are their surer bets. Itâs not a human right or constitutional right or even moral right, to go to those schools. And doesnât make sense to treat it like it is.</p>
<p>Now, I expect you will turn back to the words- âon the table.â Iâm sorry, but in this kind of high stakes competition, the kid either puts it forth or doesnât. He gets it or doesnât. They donât somehow conjure that he would be an 1100/800. </p>
<p>And that is fair. Help them learn what the deal is, help them show that.</p>
<p>Fretfulmother, you know the answer. Leadership isnât just manifest in being elected captain of the team or SB president. (Like those arenât mostly popularity contests anyway in many cases)</p>
<p>Both my kids showed leadership in ECs (outside school) that demonstrated they could take initiative, cone up with new ideas, influence others. They never were elected captain or officer of anything. </p>
<p>Why would you think adcoms donât get this? Do you think they are that stupid that they only think leadership counts if itâs an elected position? </p>
<p>âMy viewpoint is that they should automatically assume that each person has something more than simple academics to bring to the table.â</p>
<p>Betty Bright has to put forth effort to show sheâs compelling and interesting. Why shouldnât Greg Genius have to do the same? Why should adcoms assume thereâs more to Greg than what he presents? Betty doesnât get that pass. </p>
<p>I think your heart bleeds for Greg Genius and youâre willing to go to bat for him at a far higher level than youâd go to bat for Betty Bright. </p>
<p>"I donât understand how saying that a 700 on the SAT is enough translates into saying that MIT doesnât care about academic factors. "</p>
<p>Me neither. Itâs a really blunt and linear interpretation. </p>
<p>âThey can take 5%. They have to cull through for the ones they think are their surer bets. Itâs not a human right or constitutional right or even moral right, to go to those schools. And doesnât make sense to treat it like it is.â</p>
<p>QM, let me lay it on the line. Do you think Greg Genius should be given âallowanceâ not to demonstrate he is interesting, compelling, will play well with others because his brainpower should make up for that? </p>
<p>(And Iâm not talking about âGreg kicks puppies and trips little old ladies as they try to cross the street.â Of course thatâs an automatic disqualifier,)</p>
<p>Actual leadership isnât merely getting elected pres of a club. You are right, fretful mother. Leadership is a quality, not a title. As in real life. Your effort, what it is for, what you take on and your commitment over time, can matter more. Itâs one reason I get annoyed when someone suggests itâs about a jam-packed resume. And that adcoms will automatically swoon.</p>
<p>In some ways, what a kid pursues, chooses to pursue, is reflective of vision and perspective, how they step forth. It can be seen in small things. We know that, IRL. </p>
<p>Balance is good. </p>
<p>@fretfulmother: While thereâs a lot of talk about leadership, something I donât often hear mentioned in discussions of college applications is responsibility. In my experience college AOs are just as impressed, if not more so, by kids who have demonstrated the ability to handle adult level responsibility as they are by kids elected to leadership roles in clubs and sports. </p>
<p>The only official leadership role my now college sophomore had on his application was a minor co-captainship of a non-sports school activity. What he did have was adult level roles in the things he did outside of school. He was training new volunteers at the place where heâd been a long-term volunteer himself, and he was just shy of receiving a professional certification on par with being a wilderness guide or a commercial pilot. Put yourself in the shoes of an AO-who would you rather admit, a kid who was president of the Green Club, Spanish Club, and Library League or the kid who was part of an adult expedition up Denali?</p>
<p>I should also say that I donât think it requires something as splashy as mountaineering to make an impression. I sometimes see kids with experience outside of school sell themselves short. They say things like, âI donât have any leadership because I have to manage my familyâs store after school.â not realizing that this is evidence of real maturity and competence.</p>
<p>âWhy would you think adcoms donât get this? Do you think they are that stupid that they only think leadership counts if itâs an elected position?â</p>
<p>@Pizzagirl - whoa, no need to be so harsh. I was curious as to a real live adcom kind of take on this, and how to present it, and maybe some new things for me to learn about the process. Normally âleadershipâ for kids gets conflated with captainships and so forth IME.</p>
<p>And thanks for all the answers, too, you and others!</p>
<p>QuantMech: I wonder whether what we disagree about is what the definition of âworking out sensiblyâ is. I have definitely seen kids who I thought were wonderful, talented students and human beings get rejected by colleges I thought should have accepted them. I just didnât see any of them shut out of an appropriate, challenging education. </p>
<p>For instance, quite a number of my childrenâs public-school friends followed a strategy of applying to several Ivies, maybe MIT, and Pitt, and lots of them wound up in Pittâs honors program because they werenât accepted at any of the other colleges. These were great, hardworking, motivated, successful students who easily qualified as legitimate applicants to Harvard, or Columbia, or Penn; they just didnât get in. (Someone said upthread that at Pitt no one had a chip on his shoulder. Um, not so.) They knew how to make Pitt work for them. All the qualities that made them successful high school students made them successful college students there, and there were plenty of opportunities available to them. Was it the same as going to Harvard or MIT? Certainly not. But were any of these kids remotely in the tiny category of people for whom the difference between Harvard and Pitt might really matter? Honestly, no. Most of them are in medical school now. I have seen a few kids over the years who might have been in that category, and they werenât all accepted everywhere (although some were), but they were all accepted somewhere appropriate. </p>
<p>I would also say that, if I look at the dozens of kids I know pretty well who have completed college in the past five years, the ones whose educations I admire the most â who got the most out of their college experience, who grew the most and got the closest to their dreams (and whose dreams expanded the most) â went to: Wesleyan (x2), Amherst, Carleton, McGill, Toronto, and Stanford. Not necessarily the list I would have expected. The Stanford guy basically met high expectations, and one of the Wesleyans was a superstar going back to grade school. They, and the Amherst, were the only ones who went to their first-choice college. The Toronto person was a really smart, highly intellectual student with spotty grades in high school because she hated working on things that didnât interest her, and that seems to have kept her out of more prestigious colleges. The rest were good, diligent, imperfect high school students who were turned down by the Harvards and MITs of the world, but who blossomed/were nurtured into something special where they went. </p>
<p>As for QuantMechâs comment about someone with a 800 Math SAT clearly having more math potential than someone with a 700: One of my kids had an 800 Math SAT, in one sitting, the other got a 700 on the second try. Their Math 2 SAT II scores were 780 and 730, respectively. The high-scoring oneâs teachers always cautioned that there were limits on his/her math potential, and experience has borne that out repeatedly. The other was consistently thought to be gifted at math, but lost interest in it at the end of middle school. After that, that oneâs ability was generally used to get Bs in math with little or no work. As an adult, that one has found it easy to pick up math more advanced than he/she ever studied in college or before. Obviously, itâs just an anecdote, but I doubt itâs that uncommon. </p>
<p>I would see the expedition up Denali as something bought by rich parents. FWIW.</p>
<p>Leadership is a hard to measure quality, but it is about being ahead of the curve. That is, HS students who are elected to long-standing clubs are popular, which is good, but they are not really leading in a way that would appeal to an elite school. Students who have activities which reflect maturity (as noted by Sue22) certainly look more like leaders, but so do students who are working off the beaten path.</p>
<p>Well, my heart probably does bleed for Greg Genius, PG, but that is not relevant to the specific point I am trying to make. </p>
<p>lookingfoward said that I am âparsing words.â In my view, it is something different from that.</p>
<p>I take it as an absolute given that every single human being has more to offer than academics, no matter how strong the academic are. BJâs words were a negation of that. You could say that I am reading them too literally, and/or that they were just exaggerated for the sake of effect. I think that the actual statement reveals a point of view; perhaps more so than was intended. In my observation, this is true in many contexts in human communication.</p>
<p>I have tried to hold out an olive branch to lookingfoward, in the form of my comment that it is perhaps âoperationally equivalentâ to say that a person âhas nothing more to put on the tableâ and to say that the person âdid not put anything more on the table.â When you look at the underlying reality, the two statements are quite different. I am inclined to think that BJ actually meant what he said, as he said it.</p>
<p>Iâd only ask to see that the file from Greg Genius is read with the same sympathetic eye that the file from Betty Bright is read, and not that the admissions committee members strain to find things in Gregâs file that they wouldnât work to find in Bettyâs.</p>
<p>To a significant extent, in the past there was so much dumping on people who thought that academics could get them into MIT (how quaint!) that I genuinely doubt that the files were read in the same frame of mind. I think this may have changed now. </p>
<p>PurpleTitan #520: Unfortunately I do not know the answer to your question. I do not know of anyone who scored points on the USAMO and applied to Caltech, MIT, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, <em>and</em> Stanford. Those are rather different colleges. </p>
<p>However, a person could easily wind up with no admissions in that set come the end of March, if he/she applied to just three of them (+ other colleges, of course), and if the three from that set included MIT, but did not include Caltech. At least, this was so in the past.</p>
<p>As I mentioned earlier, Caltech is not for everyone. Itâs not the solution to this problem. From some of the commentary above, it seems to be worse than I knew.</p>
<p>Sure, itâs not a âmoral rightâ to go to any of the âtopâ schools. But I think it is a moral right to be regarded as having something to offer, <em>as a human being.</em> Academics are not something to offer <em>as a human being</em> in the sense that I am using this phrase. I have never known anyone who had nothing more to offer than whatever their academics were.</p>
<p>@QuantMech - it is possible that you are instinctively reacting (vis-a-vis Greg Genius) to the sometimes-expressed feeling in popular culture that each person is a âzero sum gameâ.</p>
<p>Specifically, in the US at least, people often follow up with a derogatory comment about looks/style with, âbut sheâs so niceâ. And sometimes teachers follow up on a comment about poor academic ability with, âbut he works so hardâ. We want to believe that people, particularly kids, have compensatory strengths when we see weaknesses. Itâs something nice about Americans that we would love everyone to have been born with a fair slate of abilities, challenges, and opportunities. (In spite of the obvious ridiculousness of that wish, in the cold harsh light of reality.)</p>
<p>IME it is hard for some of us to believe in our heart of hearts that a kid with stats like Greg Genius really could be âall thatâ and also have even more wonderful personal qualities. I think it must be very hard to be an Admissions person at one of these elite colleges. Itâs probably even harder if the adcom (like MJ at MIT?) didnât necessarily hit all those successes that characterize the schoolâs applicants.</p>
<p>Because of the desire to give kids more chances, some adcom readers might be looking for a reason that Betty Bright is a little bit better than Greg Genius, specifically <em>because</em> Gregâs stats are higher. Even without any personal empathy for Betty Bright, or personal resentment of Greg Genius.</p>
<p>JHS: I think we mean approximately the same thing by having admissions âwork out sensibly.â I am maybe a bit more demanding about the school choices that I think should be available to âGreg Genius.â (Who would have guessed that! 
) </p>
<p>You might live in a more academically rarefied region than we do, because you appear to have quite seen a few more strong studentsâ outcomes than I haveâthough you might be counting each of your childrenâs friends in a seven-year time span, going from students who were seniors when your children were freshmen through students who were freshmen when your children were seniors. And having two children also gives you a longer time span to reference. </p>
<p>The remarks about your sons and math are interesting. How much more advanced is the math you are talking about? I think a lot of math becomes easy when it is learned outside of school, for at least two reasons: 1) It is possible to go at your own pace. You are not held back, with the risk of becoming bored, by the necessity to moderate the pace to a whole class. Also, if you encounter an idea that acts as a stickler, you can spend more time, precisely where itâs needed. 2) Math anxiety is almost entirely absent when you study math on your own. Also, there are no homework requirements, that might actually involve grinding. My guess about your anecdote is that your younger son devoted so little effort to math in school that he didnât work fast enough on the SAT, or didnât think enough about the questions. A person may miss some of the SAT math questions just by being a bit inattentive. Or half-asleep when the SAT starts. Or mis-gridding an answer. Or in a rare case (which has happened once within my memory), by answering a question correctly, when the official SAT answer was wrong. </p>
<p>Incidentally, as far as I can determine, Henry Park, the Groton student mentioned by Daniel Golden, went to Carnegie Mellon, then transferred to Johns Hopkins where he majored in neuroscience (and which I think outranks Carnegie Mellon in neuroscience), then on to Yale Medical School, and in 2012 was matched with a Residency in Radiation Oncology at Yale-New Haven Hospital. So things have worked out fine for him so far, though it may have helped him to have Dan Golden figuratively breathing down later admissions committee membersâ necks, on his behalf.</p>
<p>I have been looking for the math journal article on âMapping the Hypercubeâ by Henry Park and John Roberts, but have not found it. I would be interested if anyone can find a link to it. </p>
<p>âThe only official leadership role my now college sophomore had on his application was a minor co-captainship of a non-sports school activity. What he did have was adult level roles in the things he did outside of school. He was training new volunteers at the place where heâd been a long-term volunteer himself, and he was just shy of receiving a professional certification on par with being a wilderness guide or a commercial pilot. Put yourself in the shoes of an AO-who would you rather admit, a kid who was president of the Green Club, Spanish Club, and Library League or the kid who was part of an adult expedition up Denali?â</p>
<p>My Sâs EC activity is similar at the broad conceptual level â doing something at a community level in which he was the only kid and interacted with adults, and didnât let the fact that he was a kid stop him from being involved in an area / organization he was interested in. Of course colleges see that as leadership, even though there was no election-by-the-student-body.</p>
<p>BTW, as we talk about unconscious / subconscious biases we all have (and we ALL do), I know if I were an adcom, Iâd probably subconsciously downgrade a lot of the âpresident of the student bodyâ because I think so much of it is just high school popularity contests. Maybe in some cases Iâd be right and some Iâd be wrong, but presumably it would all come out in the wash if a fellow adcom was a real fan of such types of positions. </p>