<p><a href=“http://www.china.org.cn/english/education/219170.htm[/url]”>http://www.china.org.cn/english/education/219170.htm</a>
According to this article “Wu started learning English in her spare time in 2002” . She is a famous person, yet academically she shows nothing near a perfect “800” SAT score in Math or English. I have heard that many so called “top” schools in the USA give away degrees to the children of “famous” people from foreign countries. In Wu’s case, i wonder how can she handle “tough classes” in a competitive environment like Harvard.</p>
<p>Where does it mention her SAT scores in the article?</p>
<p>She was also admitted to 7 other “prestigious universities” including Yale and Stanford, all of which must have thought she could handle the work.</p>
<p>I have a friend who started learning English in 10th grade, and now, by her senior year, is perfectly fluent. It’s not that big of an issue. </p>
<p>Wu seems pretty amazing. She taught herself Braille, English, and Swedish, and is going to learn German and French. “Wu won another two gold medals for running in the National Games for Disabled Persons in 2003.” That’s pretty cool.</p>
<p>If you look at PrincetonReview’s admissions factors, you’ll see that Harvard is one of the few schools that doesn’t rate standardized test scores as “very important” in its admissions decisions. Of course, with its applicant pool, it doesn’t have to - most of the pool is equally well-qualified on strictly academic terms. Given that, it does what any of us would do - it looks for the most remarkable, most interesting, more talented people available in order to try to attract those who are likely to make an impact in the world.</p>
<p>She is an amazing student, an exemplary example of the kind of person who stands out in Harvard’s admissions pool. H’s admission pool is filled with people who have 800 scores on parts of the SAT. Such people are ordinary in that pool. The extraordinary applicants are the ones who have the requisite scores (600 and above on each part of the SAT I) as well as remarkable talents and intellectual passion. </p>
<p>Harvard wants the kind of people who not only can handle the academic work at Harvard (something that 90% of H applicants can do according to the dean of admissions), but also have a track record indicating that they will add to the campus environment and will contribute to the world afterward, not just contribute to their own well being. . Wu certainly fits the bill.</p>
<p>'Few students of any nationality receive acceptance letters from eight top US universities. The fact that Wu Jing is blind makes the achievement even more stunning in her hometown in East China’s Jiangsu Province. </p>
<p>Wu, 21, left for the US two weeks ago. She will study at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a major step in her goal to work at the United Nations on behalf of disabled people worldwide. …</p>
<p>Wu was selected to compete in sports for disabled persons when she was 12. The next year, she won two gold medals in the 100-meter and 200-meter sprint in Jiangsu Provincial Games for Disabled Persons. </p>
<p>Wu won another two gold medals for running in the National Games for Disabled Persons in 2003. </p>
<p>In the next two years, she competed in the Asian Games for Juvenile Disabled and Athens Paralympic Games. </p>
<p>Wu started learning English in her spare time in 2002 when she was preparing for an international sports event in Shanghai. </p>
<p>She purchased materials for studying English and got her roommates to read them letter by letter so that she could translate them into Braille. Wu then studied in her dormitory till midnight. </p>
<p>Wu can now speak fluent English and once acted as an interpreter for other Chinese players during the Athens Paralympic Games. </p>
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<p>She sounds inspirational!</p>
<p>She’s 1 in a billion. That’s what it takes to consider Harvard a safety school. Needless to say, very,very,very few people come near that.</p>
<p><a href=“gadad:”>quote</a>
If you look at PrincetonReview’s admissions factors, you’ll see that Harvard is one of the few schools that doesn’t rate standardized test scores as “very important” in its admissions decisions.
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<p>That’s not what the admissions data show. Consider the graphs in the Revealed Preferences study, based on several hundred applications to Harvard by high achieving students at top-500 high schools, and in The Early Admissions Game. The graphs display what one would expect, which is that Harvard’s admission is relatively uncorrelated with SAT below the very top range, provided those SATs are high to begin with. In that sense SAT is not “very important”. However, Harvard internal studies have shown that very high test scores correlate with high student performance (magna and summa degrees), and the graphs of admission rate by SAT score indeed climb steeply at the top of the scale. Admissions is even more sensitive to numerically graded tests beyond the level of the SAT, such as AP and IB results, AMC/AIME, USAMO/IMO, physics olympiad, TopCoder, etc; one can consider those as SAT-III, SAT-IV, SAT-V, effectively extending the score range well past 800 per SAT subject, and it is clear that for people who can present strong results on those tests, Harvard admissions considers those numbers “very important” indeed. </p>
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<p>Most of Harvard’s competitors have about the same applicant pool, or a stronger one in the case of MIT and Caltech. Those schools release their Common Data Sets, and on those questionnaires they state that standardized tests are “very important”. That includes Caltech, Stanford, Yale and Princeton. MIT says scores are only “important”, but again, as judged by the admissions data in the sources above, its admissions process is the second most score-sensitive in the country, behind Caltech, and that is reflected in its SAT ranges (also second only to Caltech). </p>
<p>So even if one takes Harvard at face value about scores not being “very important”, whatever distinguishes that from mere importance, a low-scoring applicant who is not in a position to consider Harvard admission as very likely (which is most low-scoring applicants) would still have to contend with the high importance of scores at all the rival schools.</p>
<p>It will be interesting to see whether MIT raises the importance of objective metrics, including the SAT’s, in the post-Jones admissions era.</p>
<p>Ivy League schools definitely want unique people like Wu. She’s definitely someone you won’t find anywhere else!</p>