<p>^ yes and the question is why should one type of hard work have a defined reward at an institution that has nothing to do with the specific hardwork or definition of it. If the institute wants to reward specific attributes, they will come up with some.</p>
<p>Wait - they already have a definition and they don’t care to announce their unique formula to the world. I also get the feeling they don’t give a darn what people think about their formula. :p</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>OMG does everyone have to be Edison? If MIT had all Edisons it would be a pretty boring place. Even Edison wouldn’t like it. 90% of the applicants are qualified, and then they take for institutional needs which enrich everyone’s college experience. I mean 90% can do the work and were good at math and science in high school.</p>
<p>Don’t get me wrong, you need a few Edisons. So go ahead and take your 10% great engineers, 10% of the best scientists you can fine, 10% business guys, 10% athletes, 10% theater people, 15% super organizers and community service people, 5% pistol club people, 5% of people who will participate in the kinky sex club, and well you can fill out the rest with whatever activity you are thinking of. It’s a stew of people.<br>
The fact that MIT is popular proves that this philosophy is sound.</p>
<p>Why is this so hard for people to understand?</p>
<p>“5% of people who will participate in the kinky sex club” - so MIT is allowed to participate in Harvard clubs too? I thought it was limited to classes.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Just because there is a predefined solution doesn’t mean that they can’t take that solution and apply it to another problem. I believe there is a lot of layering of knowledge. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I think a good number of these talented kids pursue math research and a lot of the discoveries in math can be applied to different areas. Math is the foundation for so many things that it is a benefit to society to promote math and the kids who excel in it.</p>
<p>Yo, collegealum!</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, #2253, I think you are not taking my “sufficient, but not necessary” statement into account (or not enough, anyway). How many people do you think that the MIT admissions staff anticipates they will probably wind up in heavily quantitative majors? I’d say more than 900 (by this, I mean not the specific people, just the overall numbers). If there is information on the distribution of majors at MIT, one could make this estimate a little better–sorry, do not currently have time to look for that.</p>
<p>The point is that I have no doubt whatever that the students who score points on the USAMO are in the top 900 who apply to MIT. It really doesn’t matter for this argument that not all students have information about the USAMO. I am just arguing that there are not 800+ students who are applying to MIT and are capable of a higher level of mathematical/analytical work when they apply (and, I think, all the way through senior year). </p>
<p>Someone posted that non-USAMO students had no difficult with a class that some of the USAMO qualifiers struggled with. I can readily accept this. However, I doubt that there were 800+ such non-USAMO students who had no trouble with the class. (Most likely, this was a relatively small, upper level math class, not one taken by 800-900 MIT students per year.)</p>
<p>If “my” 18 are auto-admitted, do you think this really means turning down someone who is stronger on the quantitative/analytical side? I think the numbers do come into play here. They are of the essence as background for my “sufficient, but not necessary” qualification.</p>
<p>(Please note, as above, I do not include in the 18 any who ought to be disqualified based on other aspects of the record.)</p>
<p>If the numbers were considerably greater than 18, then I would re-think my analysis.</p>
<p>SBJ - wasn’t that a plot from Numb3rs? Charlie’s book - something like “The math of friendship”?</p>
<p>Texaspg - ooh, and my son has a new girlfriend! Maybe he can investigate if MIT students can participate in Harvard clubs! ;)</p>
<p>PCHope #2294, this has probably been answered later on the thread (and I have just reached your post), but I am certain that chashaobao is correct: collegealum314 meant groundbreaking research done by high-school students, not ground-breaking research done down the road by someone who did not make MOSP.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Is the campus vibrant merely because bright young people (who can be identified from grades and test scores) are interested in lots of things, or is the effort of the admissions committee to go beyond grades and test scores to enroll interesting people playing a role? To answer this question one needs to do the study I mentioned.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Yes, I did mean that I’ve never seen groundbreaking math research done in high school by someone who didn’t also make MOSP.</p>
<p>marciemi - is it the younger or the older? I think the younger one has to wait an year to join or 3 based on the definition of adult for this harvard club…</p>
<p>On a side note - did any of your kids get to USAMO?</p>
<p>I wasn’t around when texaspg posted #2313. However, I disagree with MITChris for several reasons. </p>
<p>First, there are students who fail the introductory physics course there (and I am fairly sure that there are students who fail the introductory math course). There are enough of them for MIT to offer a “trailer” section that repeats the fall course, with additional help, in the spring. Some of these students will have succumbed to World of Warcraft addiction, or to the lures of “Wow, now I can do anything that I want! I’ll study later!” However, I think that some of them simply weren’t prepared.</p>
<p>Second, the observations of MIT faculty I know do not square with MITChris’s comment. Please note that this is not (emphatically not) an anti-AA comment. The people I know at MIT support AA, as do I. If the students about whom they were complaining were preponderantly in the AA category, they would never have brought it up. I have no reason to assume that the demographics of the group are significantly different from MIT’s overall demographics (at least with regard to the majority group).</p>
<p>Third, I don’t believe that MIT really offers “the work.” They offer a wide variety of courses, at a wide variety of levels. The military academies come the closest of any colleges I know to having “the work,” but even they have separate, more challenging classes for students who are prepared for them. If by “the work,” MITChris means that there is some work at MIT that all admitted students can do, then I would agree with that (for the most part, at least by the second try). That seems different to me from the picture that MITChris is painting. It’s reminiscent of the “Marilee doesn’t make mistakes” claims about admissions not so many years ago.</p>
<p>you.disagree.with.MITChris.</p>
<p>And, back to Jones.
What really is the point here?
Are we just arguing to argue? You said, much earlier, that you are- or as I read it: trying to hash out or flesh out an idea you previously couldn’t find much suppport for…</p>
<p>Apologies if I got that wrong. As giterdone pointed out, emphatically, to me, in big red: it’s America.<br>
To each her own-?</p>
<p>Quantmech - you are aware that MIT first semester does not count towards their grades and so a lot of kids go in not caring about their grades and explore their new found freedoms?</p>
<p>Example - A freshman was found walking around naked on campus high on acid just before the school started this semester.</p>
<p>A conversation I had with my kid at another college- why was the average so low for a chem class for the first md term. Kid - My freshman dorm was partying 4 weeks straight until they figured the exercising of new found freedom and college grades are inversely proportional to each other. Imagine the same at MIT where the grades don’t even count.</p>
<p>There is another post responding to a question by MITChris.</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/13339664-post4.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/13339664-post4.html</a></p>
<p>"by “sufficiently” and “success”, we basically mean “will graduate from MIT by more than the skin of their teeth”; namely, that they will be able to do the work and also pursue their area of interest and not just be constantly trying to keep their head above water. "</p>
<p>Despite everything I have written, I do see the value in applying a holistic analysis to the admissions process. However, if a person approaches the application of a student who is very, very strong in mathematics with the thought, “Oh, no, not another textureless Korean math grind” [when I think it’s entirely possible that the student was Korean-American], then I think that their holistic assessment is likely to be affected somewhat by that pre-existing attitude. </p>
<p>Here is a proposition: when everyone hired by Marilee Jones has left MIT admissions, and only people hired by Stu Schmill or his successor remain, they could drop the auto-admit for “my” 18.</p>
<p>Incidentally, I too would like to see a study of the campus impact at MIT of various students, based on the holistic personal assessment at the time of application. This could be purely qualitative and descriptive. Students in theatre would presumably show up on a list of the actors/stagehands/technicians for at least one performance. Students on sports teams would show up on the roster. Students who were involved in res-hall government would show up on those lists. Students involved in Habitat for Humanity might show up on lists of “gold hammer pin” recipients. Students who served as undergrad teaching assistants would be on the TA list. Participants in undergrad research might show up as paper co-authors. Students who won NSF fellowships for graduate work would show up there. It would probably take longer to detect the successful entrepreneurs, but I hope that they’d show up in the lists of major donors sooner or later.</p>
<p>No quantification, no ranking, just some indication of impact.</p>
<p>I also think that the “just good friends” group could be identifiable, but have to admit that at the moment, I have not seen a way to do it without a breach of privacy.</p>
<p>Right, texaspg, I know that first semester grades don’t count, but the pass or fail has an effect on classes in subsequent semesters. Also, a student who barely passes a first semester course is probably only weakly prepared for the next semester.</p>
<p>I don’t know the story about the freshman you mentioned. If he/she was a victim, who was provided the drug without knowing about it (e.g., it was slipped into a drink by someone else), then I’d hope that the “someone else” had no connection with MIT. If the student took the drug knowingly, I wish that MIT admissions had screened him/her out. For the sake of my argument, I hope the person was not also a USAMO qualifier!</p>
<p>^ he was just exercising his new found freedoms and not a victim. </p>
<p>You have 1100 freshmen on a campus. They are told we don’t put too much pressure on you here and want you to get used to the speed and stuff and not worry too much about grades. I see about 800-900 paying attention to their classes and a hundred or so going ok, let me blow off a couple of midterms and by then it is too late to even pass.</p>
<p>I truly don’t believe your professor firends have a clue how freshmen think if they are complaining. :D</p>
<p>I’ll go back and cancel my remark about Habitat for Humanity’s “golden hammer” lapel pin. Apparently on Cape Cod, you can buy your way in (and it’s only $500! a bargain!). The place I am familiar with gives golden hammer pins to volunteers with 500 hours of service (hmm . . . Cape Cod evidently values this at $1 per hour). Some places seem to recognize volunteers with the golden hammer pin only after many years of service.</p>
<p>Maybe MIT could replace one of its questions with: If you enroll at MIT, how will you use your “new found freedom?” </p>
<p>What happened to all the passion for STEM subjects?</p>
<p>Also, I don’t think the profs were talking exclusively about freshmen.</p>
<p>Someone dredged up an old thread on the MIT board and it seems the statement that 15% of students were having serious trouble in class according to an MIT faculty member (as told to QM) was mirrorred by Marilee Jone’s comment that 15% of the people that were chosen under her administration wouldn’t have gotten in previously.</p>
<p>Since faculty tend not to pay attention to admissions, it is striking that these two numbers are the same.</p>