<p>“seem to generate intense opposition.” Is that your point? Because, sorry, it drives me batty. Admissions gets misrepresented, assumptions fly. On one hand, we get concession about not closely reading, and on the other, a whole lotta faulty over-interpretation and speculation about what does go on- or what a few words mean. And anecdote, “I know someone who-.” Or some other poster on some other thread who was reporting 2nd hand info. Sheesh. So what? </p>
<p>We get these threads that start out with a general discussion and they- poof!- morph into what one or two people want to vent, defend, justify about their own POV…about MIT. About sensitivities to this one little thing or two they think should morph it for all the rest. And when someone makes a valid point, then we get all the “Yes, but I just think” - and it all starts…all…over…again. Not to mention detours and little tales. And more assumptions.</p>
<p>Why? What does it satisfy?<br>
High stakes admission isn’t about nicey-nicey, oh the poor dears, or hypothetical. </p>
<p>Admission IS MIT. There is no mythical separation, some confusion by adcoms what the school is about, what works, what kids are capable of, what the admin and faculty want, what sorts of kids succeed, fit and thrive. </p>
<p>QM, physics is too important to just assume- why not go down and speak directly with your admissions folks, find out, give input? It’s possible your U’s adcoms don’t have a straight reporting line- but try to find out if that necessarily means they are totally disconnected. Maybe your school does hierarchically rank applicants by stats- but the elite colleges make it clear they don’t.</p>
<p>And nowhere in the H article is it about “we have the very bestest SAT scores.” Which is why it is laughable to think that Harvard would be “upset” about the impact on its brand if Caltech were to have higher average math SAT scores (which maybe they already do, who knows). It wouldn’t damage brand equity in the least. Harvard is interested in maintaining brand equity among movers and shakers, not people for whom a missed question or two on a standardized test some Sunday morning is meaningful with a capital M. </p>
<p>“PG, my university does not have a unified organizational mission (though there is some effort in that direction). Our admissions staff is definitely not the same as the university. The reporting lines are different, there is little cross-communication, and most of the faculty have very little idea what admissions is doing. I doubt that it is so much different at MIT.”</p>
<p>Of course the reporting lines are different. Of course there is little direct communication. That’s not the point. Someone at the top has a strategic vision, has communicated that down, and different departments fulfill it. The admissions staff didn’t just dream up their criteria out of nowhere. They are accountable to the top to bring in a class that best fulfills the mission (which may be different if it’s a public u which has to serve the taxpayers of a state - I don’t know if yours is public or private). If they don’t deliver, they’ll be asked to change their methods. </p>
<p>Anyway, you’ve mentioned before that your friends who are profs routinely complain about the bottom x%, but somehow never find the time to go in and sit down and find out the adcom’s POV and express their concerns. Well, then, guess what. Apparently grabbing those last few geniuses isn’t all that important to them, and they are just complainers. (And they aren’t any busier than any other working professional.) </p>
<p>“Harvard is not your father’s Buick . . . er, I mean not your father’s Harvard. It’s not stuffy. It’s not reinforcing the patriarchal hegemony. It’s very diverse these days. “Where? I don’t see a Harvard. That’s not a Harvard.””</p>
<p>Yes - and reinforcing that brand equity is part of the mission of Harvard, which translates into admission priorities, which is why they don’t rack and stack scores. See how it works?</p>
<p>I swear, just like some physics concepts are so intuitive to you, this is all very intuitive and self-evident to me. If MIT wanted your super genius friends so badly, they’d take them. They didn’t. That’s unfortunate, but as the great philosopher Jagger once said, you can’t always get what you want. Meanwhile, they can ■■■■■ and moan that they are suffering with all the inferior minds at CMU, or they can exhibit the characteristics of winners and get on with life. </p>
<p>What I don’t understand is why my suggestions generate opposition that is really rather fierce (plus some equally strong support).</p>
<p>I’ve been wondering if it has to do with those who tend to respect and support authority figures and those whose automatic reaction is to question the status quo. I spent a little time looking at the Myers Briggs table, to try and relate the types to the posts here. My immediate reaction was “this looks just like horoscope readings in the newspaper” and then "well, it is true I’m too judgey.</p>
<p>So these supposedly oh-so-brilliant MIT professors are dissatisfied with student quality and wish the adcoms would use some other criteria to identify budding or actual geniuses. But they apparently expect the adcom to know this by osmosis, because they can’t be bothered to make a phone call, send an email, set up an appointment to voice their concerns.</p>
<p>People like that are the definition of book smart and real world dumb. They aren’t as brilliant as they think if they can’t even figure out the basics of expressing their opinions to the relevant powers and working together to find common ground or at least understanding why the u makes the decisions it does. </p>
<p>Sorry, all their brilliance counts for very little if they can’t navigate real life. </p>
<p>And maybe MIT admissions wishes to avoid students like that, too. </p>
<p>JHS #671If memory serves, during the last years of the Hargadon regime at Princeton, I saw breakdowns of admitted students by SAT score ranges, and it was consistently the case that students with 750-790 on a particular test (either Math or, then, Verbal) had a somewhat higher rate of admission than those who scored 800 on the same test. Which, I think, was generally interpreted to reflect Hargadon’s relative dislike of “brains” in favor of “leaders,” and also perhaps some yield protection vis a vis its rivals. But Princeton was still accepting plenty of 800-scorers, then, and 800-scorers had a meaningfully higher likelihood of admission than those who scored 700-740.</p>
<p>QM #732Finally, for me this is the crux of the matter, if it is true. (I don’t know.) But here is what OperaDad reported on the Friendlier MIT Admissions site thread:
" 09-03-2013 at 6:20 am
In their talk, the MIT Admissions office said the stats of the average Admit is lower than the average Applicant. As long as you are qualified, what you do with your talent is a lot more important than upping your stats by a few more points."</p>
<p>Something I’ve been wondering about is whether inexplicable admissions results at MIT have to do with yield management. If they think they are going to lose an applicant to another school, would they prefer to wait list that applicant? If they do a lot of this, do you end up with the admissions outcome OperaDad describes? I haven’t been able to understand from the followup posts whether that outcome is true or not. Could someone please enlighten me? I’ll be honest - I cannot read and understand all the tables and need this information broken down as simply as humanly possible. Thanks in advance if someone is willing to do it. I would really appreciate it.</p>
<p>I have a hard time believing that any institution–especially one of the caliber of MIT–could have such a disconnect between faculty and adcoms and still be so highly regarded.</p>
<p>pizzagirl - I believe I understand why QM feels so strongly about MIT admissions. I have no theories whatsoever as to why you feel so strongly about her views. Or why your reaction is to oppose them so rudely. </p>
<p>Do you ever read threads on this board, where you don’t participate because it just seems too silly to be worth the time?</p>
<p>Until reading your post on the police thread in the cafe, I really thought we had some common ground, but am afraid I was terribly mistaken. Not that you care, of course. And why should you? No reason at all.</p>
<p>"I have a hard time believing that any institution–especially one of the caliber of MIT–could have such a disconnect between faculty and adcoms and still be so highly regarded. "</p>
<p>Sally: Some posting here, and probably a few just reading along, have an understanding of how universities work. If any of them are willing to explore the idea behind your post, I think it has the potential to be as enlightening for some readers as the exploration of math SAT scores and teams/competitions. There is no reason for most of us to have any familiarity on these subjects, but sometimes interesting to see how far off our perceptions are from reality. imho</p>
<p>You can actually get an idea if this is true or not by looking at the statistics MIT published in its website.</p>
<p>Harvard is interesting, because they actually do reject IMO medalists from the US (IMO is the competition you participate in if you do well in USAMO). I haven’t been keeping up recently, but I can’t think of a single IMO medalist from the US who was rejected from MIT.</p>
<p>Would the geniuses get any sympathy if they were diagnosed with having special needs? </p>
<p>It would not be uncommon for some of these genius types to have deficiencies which may make it difficult for them to assimilate easily in the mainstream world. For the betterment of society, though, shouldn’t their brainpower be nurtured? And aren’t we obligated as a society to support the disabled so they maximize their potential? I understand that a private institution like MIT is not bound to such things, but given that it is a very unique place where these types flourish, would it be too much to ask that they bear this “burden”?</p>
<p>I know a fair number of these scary smart kids. Not only are they brilliant, but they are some of the kindest and humblest kids around, which is why it is so unpleasant to read such slanderous adjectives used to describe them.</p>
<p>sally: I only understand a very little bit of what happens at universities. My understanding (which is based on very limited data and more than likely entirely wrong) is that professors will only see a very few applications, which will have been sent to them by admissions with the hope the professors will help with recruiting those students. I also have the impression most professors don’t think their opinions matter at all to the admissions office. I could be absolutely wrong there as well. And of course not all admissions offices are the same. And not all universities are the same.</p>
<p>shravas, #750–I might be able to do as you suggest. I am not sure whether is it possible, however, because the SAT scores are separated into 100-point bands, in the Common Data Set section that gives the % of enrolled students with certain SAT scores on each section. Does everyone who thinks that 700 is basically the same as 800 also think that 600 is basically the same as 690? I don’t.</p>
<p>But if someone provides me with a link to suitably differentiated data, I’d be glad to try the analysis.</p>
<p>My position on Harvard is the same as Harvard’s: Harvard is the best. At everything. No exceptions. So they are also the best at rejecting US IMO medalists (no matter how looney that seems to me).</p>
<p>What I think about Harvard goes back to a direct comment made to me by a person who worked in admissions there. Admittedly, it was a number of years ago, but I see no real change in their admissions philosophy (except for outreach to more diverse groups–which I applaud): Harvard is not looking for the smartest students, they are looking for the students who will be most successful. In most walks of life, these two sets of people have less overlap than they do in science (James Watson notwithstanding). </p>
<p>The only person I have ever been asked by my university to help recruit was a woman volleyball star. I’ve been at the same place for a long time.</p>
<p>I think one of the main reasons that the faculty at top schools don’t call or go to talk with the admissions staff about their concerns is that they imagine that admissions is taking the same top students they would take. They don’t think there is greater depth of talent out there–so if they lose admitted students to other schools, they must have the best of the remaining applicant group. They often have this view while their children are in elementary school or below. As their own children (if they have any) grow up, and sometimes not until their children are college applicants themselves, they start to realize how their admissions process works. The people who have spoken to me about admissions of their own children have been just as surprised as anyone pre-CC might have been (and just as annoyed, frankly). </p>
<p>I realized that the faculty I know at MIT (specifically) are/were either considerably older than I am, so their children went through a somewhat different admissions process (except at Harvard, where the institution is “self-perpetuating”), or they are considerably younger than I am. </p>
<p>bogibogi, #751: I agree with you wholeheartedly! People don’t generally describe being kind or humble as having “people skills,” but those are some of the most valuable personal characteristics around, in my opinion.</p>