<p>^^^You win.</p>
<p>^^^Most excellent! 
The blue baggers we know are now at MIT, Duke, CalTech, Yale and Oxford for various grad programs. They are in funded programs and had no UG loans.
Color me envious.</p>
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<p>Does that make proponents of the current system âspace cadetsâ?
;)</p>
<p>Weâve digressed too much into the psychological realm (partly my fault). The question is at what point of exceptional academic excellence should a particular student be accepted by MIT and any other top school pretty much no matter what. By that I mean, his proven/quantified intellectual accomplishments are such that no real or perceived flaws in the remainder of his application should disqualify him, and neither should any secondary institutional goals. I exclude criminality and insanity or psychopathy, though not extreme eccentricity. He gets in even if he mispelled a word in his essay; even if heâs Asian and the school wants to maintain a limit on how many Asians they accept; he gets in even if his GC did not give him the highest score for maturity; he gets in even if he needs financial aid. If we return to some of the original concerns in this thread, they seemed to relate to the idea that the holistic stuff sometimes goes too far.</p>
<p>"Arenât there quite a few universities which essentially auto-admit students possessing a high enough combination of GPA and SAT scores? They are rolling admissions schools, so itâs on a first-come, first-served basis until the spots are gone. (snip) So, then itâs only objectionable if MIT were to do the same? "</p>
<p>No, thatâs not the point. If MIT decided to auto admit USAMO high performers tomorrow, thatâs their prerogative. </p>
<p>But itâs silly to pretend that MIT really wants all of these students but theyâre somehow âafraid toâ because they drank the Kool aid of holistic admissions / Marilee Jones was the devil / etc. Obviously they donât see the benefit in auto admitting these kids that QM does. And itâs fair to say that they have better insight into what meets their institutional needs and fulfills their mission than she does, since they are able at any point to change them.</p>
<p>"
Anyway, of course, itâs easy to theorize that one kid denied some extraordinary opp could be that loss to the world, the universe and all time. To paint that loss as having âdrasticâ implications and that the world could never recoup or regroup and everyone would suffer and and. Well, then itâs so obvious we all âwinâ if we move to the new plan"</p>
<p>Itâs only a âdrastic lossâ if one believes important things only happen at MIT and nowhere else. Which is, of course, not true. And the idolization of MIT is as unsophisticated as the idolization of Harvard. Excellent places â among many others. And Iâm sorry, itâs a loser attitude to be obsessed with one or two.</p>
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<p>Still not getting why MIT has an obligation to do anything at all. It is a private institution.</p>
<p>At what point should a particular student be accepted by MIT, âno matter whatâ? This one is easy. At no point. This goes for any school X that is perceived to owe something to the public because so many kids are drooling to get in. No school depends on one genius more or less to fulfill its mission. More to the point, no genius depends on a particular school to achieve what he or she is capable of achieving. </p>
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<p>As you must have concluded having read the 2000-plus posts on this thread, TheGFG, it is highly unlikely that we (or any other group of admission âexpertsâ) are going to arrive at consensus on what constitutes unquestionable, bow-before-it genius.</p>
<p>" School has kids who qualify for one Intâl Olympiad or another every year. The kids who get there are those who have been eating and breathing this stuff since they were kids and were studying with profs at UMD by 9th or 10th grade (if not sooner). What I found was that these kids werenât studying to get to an Olympiad â it was that they pursued their interests to such depth that qualifying for an Olympiad became possible" </p>
<p>Exactly my thought.</p>
<p>From countingdown:</p>
<p>âS1 went to one of those DC area specialized public math/sci/CS programs. It was an incredible opportunity to have a critical mass of students who were ready to take on high level, challenging work. You ask why do so many kids in the DC area qualify? This is an area where a large number of parents have graduate degrees. Education as a ticket up is taken seriously. S1 never qualified for USAMO â was far more interested in USACO â though he took the AIME every year, as did pretty much all of his classmates. His school had kids take USAXXO exams as a matter of policy, based on what they were doing in the classroom. S made it to the top 150 in USAPhO without doing anything other than having taken lots of math and taking mathematical physics senior year. Half his math phys class made the top 150. He never bothered putting it on his college apps.â</p>
<p>I propose my own:
All usaXo qualifiers should be auto admitted to MIT. Lets reserve 100 seats or so. :D</p>
<p>MIT still asks for AMC and AIME scores. </p>
<p>I suspect the reason Thomas Jefferson has 23 kids being admitted is precisely because they are pursuing research and various USAxOs. If they were just nerdy, that is not sufficient. They are doing things at much higher level coming out of high school and it is easier to pick and choose a larger number of kids because the pool is a much better fit.</p>
<p>âholistic approachâ = âread my lipsâ or âread my hipsâ?</p>
<p>I find this study very interesting and somewhat relevant to the discussion, at least the subjects were students at one of the Ivies and they were confused by the commonly accepted/relied upon evaluation method. Perhaps most of you have read that already.</p>
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<p>[Read</a> My Hips - ScienceNOW](<a href=âhttp://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/11/read-my-hips.html]Readâ>http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/11/read-my-hips.html)</p>
<p>Thanks for the information on Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Dana Gioia, JHS. It appears that I subconsciously shifted Stevens to a less-consuming professional position. Frankly, it is amazing to me that he could combine a career as General Counsel for Hartford (abbreviating his title) with writing poetry. (Or perhaps I got his career confused with my back-up plan for QMP.)</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, #2065: With regard to the statement that âtheyâ have better insight into the institutional mission at MIT, I have to ask who âtheyâ are. I question whether the Admissions Office is really that well tied in to the faculty, to know what the faculty think. Actually, I think it is more likely that the MIT Admissions folks interact mainly with admissions personnel at other top schools. If 85-90% of the students are fine to outstanding, and the faculty are more focused on grads and post-docs in any case, and the faculty are hyper-busy, I doubt they would really bother about the remaining 10-15% of the undergrads, except to make random complaintsâeven though thatâs 100 to 150 students a year.</p>
<p>I donât consider Marilee Jones to be a âdevil.â Actually, I feel sorry for herâbut I donât think that she should have been in a position of trust and responsibility. </p>
<p>I think that it is important that the admissions personnel at MIT should understand what level of strength in mathematics USAMO qualification represents. It would be helpful if the office included a USAMO qualifier, to help put things in perspective. Itâs not clear that the office does have one. This doesnât mean that they arenât smart, even brilliant in some cases. But I think that the Admissions Office and some of the people on this thread are underestimating it as a qualification.</p>
<p>(I donât think the USAMO existed when I was in high school. If it had, I still wouldnât have qualified for it, based on my performance on the MAA tests at the time.)</p>
<p>I am not sure how many of the people on this thread are âtechiesâ or STEM types. I accept that the majority of posters here donât think that scoring points on the USAMO in 11th grade or earlier should qualify one for MIT. However, I think that the right group to be voting on this would be MIT alums, or the MIT faculty (given the real numbers, which I am just estimating).</p>
<p>I have two engineering degrees and never participated in a single math competition. I donât see scoring on any competition as a way of qualification for any admission to a tech school. Math is just one piece of it. </p>
<p>If MIT wanted people to have certain attributes, they should host their own darn exam like people in India and China do.</p>
<p>At this point, I have to admit that even I am bored with the issue of MIT admissions!</p>
<p>But to take a point in the larger context: TheGFG has raised a really good point about when it makes sense to pursue a dream (whether it is being a member of an Olympic gymnastics team or being an experimental particle physicist) and when it makes sense to move to Plan B. When a person is trying to decide, it makes sense to me for the person to consider the odds. I see no shame in moving to Plan B if the odds are very poor. The hard case is to decide when the odds are definitely against a person, but there is a 1-2% chance of success.</p>
<p>Also, I need to thank Pizzagirl for post #2001. (I am quite soft-hearted, as she suggests.)</p>
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<p>Whatâs this âletâsâ? MIT is not a government-run university. There is no âus.â </p>
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<p>How long do you think admissions staff would last if they DIDNâT seek students who could succeed in the classes at the university? Itâs not like they are admitting a bunch of partying âlaxbroâsâ and pretty but underqualified girls just to make MIT appealing to more people. They are already choosing from a highly talented groupâand rejecting most of them.</p>
<p>"Whatâs this âletâsâ? MIT is not a government-run university. There is no âus.â "</p>
<p>You mean I canât suggest my own scheme to MIT? Why not? I thought we were here to make MIT admissions better. :p</p>
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<p>I just asked a few of my friends, all of whom are math majors at MIT and qualified for USAMO in high school, and none of them thought that getting a non-zero score on the USAMO deserves an automatic admission to MIT. My guess is that if you talk to math faculty, they would be on average even more against it. From what Iâve seen, thereâs actually a fairly negative opinion of math contests in academia - at best itâs just a fun way to expose students to math but doesnât mean anything more than that.</p>