<p>Getting to national merit semi-finalist is the hard part. There is hardly a dropoff going from semi-fnalist to finalist since 15k out of 16k make the cut. There are people who dont make the cut for a few simple reasons like not taking the SAT in time to have a minimum score needed, not turning in paperwork in time or in some extreme cases, the school refusing to support their application (seen someone say it happened to their niece at a private school).</p>
<p>OTOH, it is not uncommon to be the best student in a school but not being able to crack the 2000 in SAT. Someone has to be at the top of the class in each school.</p>
<p>So at the risk of becoming âJohnny one noteâ again, I have no quibbles about most of the top 100 schools composing their classes as Pizzagirl suggests: the tuba player from Wyoming, the student leader from Exeter, the thespian from Miami. Great! More power to them! I am being serious here, not sarcastic. </p>
<p>But in terms of the Johnny one note message, focusing on MIT in particular: âAngryâ is not exactly the term to describe my thoughts about the MIT admissions office in the days of Marilee Jones (Google her, if you donât know the story); but perhaps âupsetâ and âdisappointedâ would capture it. I support affirmative action, and think that MIT should practice it. MIT does not take legacy status into account. There might be a slight tip for athletes, but I donât have a problem with that. I also note that QMP did not apply there.</p>
<p>My problems with MIT admissions, in the Jones era and unfortunately continuing to the present (to a slightly lesser extent) include but are not limited to:</p>
<p>1) Disrespect for the applicants. Marilee seems to have coined the phrase âyet another textureless Korean math grind.â This comment may have been made in response to a student who was an American citizen (have to check). In any event, this reaction falls below my minimum standard for treatment of the application of a <em>human being</em> who has probably put significant thought into the application. </p>
<p>Now, post-Tiger-mom, I can sympathize a little more with Marilee, seeing the presumably generalizable cost of a familyâs trying to turn a top 1-3% student into a top 0.01% student, but nevertheless, in those cases, the student is the <em>victim</em> of the child-rearing philosophy, and should still be treated in a thoughtful fashion.</p>
<p>To avoid an excessively long post, Iâll separate out the other issues I see, into other posts.</p>
<p>2) Actual disdain for 2400 scorers: I have sometimes wondered whether Marilee Jones had a classmate who scored 2400 on the SAT and treated her unkindly. There was a time when close reading of the MIT site suggested that not only was the admissions staff unimpressed by 2400âs (ok, fine), they approached those files with the view that the applicant had probably sacrificed something much more important to achieve those scores (this is practically a direct quotation from the site a few years back). Well, if a student has a 2400 superscored, from 6 tries at the SAT, thatâs one thingâbut pity the hapless sap who walks in to the SAT for the first time, walks out with a 2400, and applies to MIT.</p>
<p>3) Excessive emphasis on failure: At least until recently, MIT was asking applicants to discuss a time when they failed at something. In one sense, this is not a bad question. People should push their limits, and that does sometimes involve failure. Also, I understand that MIT is not looking for neurotic, risk-free perfectionists. </p>
<p>Yet most high schools do not offer much challenge to the top 0.01%. Commonly such students will enroll in college courses while they are still in high school. Due to geographic limits, most of these students will not be enrolling in HYPSM+C or similar colleges. So they will most likely not face failure in their college courses either. </p>
<p>If a student enters the Intel competition with a good project, learns something, but does not win, should that be categorized as a failure? If a student tries to rebuild an automobile engine in the garage, and canât get it running, is that a failure? I think that there are parents on CC whose offspring were not admitted to MIT because they did not fail persuasively enough.</p>
<p>I acknowledge your point, Hunt, but there are only 1,000 who actually are in the top 1,000. (Some of them may be too modest to recognize it.) Also, if we add up the entering classes at HYPSM+C, this allows an error of about a factor of 5 in the studentâs thinking. Then take genuine top students who donât actually want to go to HYPSM+C (Pizzagirl? mini? Anyone?), and you can probably accommodate all 10,000.</p>
<p>4) Back to the MIT issues, insufficient consideration of the intellectual development that it actually takes to become a good engineer/scientist. This is not an anti-AA commentary! I support affirmative action, and know that a very large number of under-represented minority students easily qualify on intellectual strength and developed ability. </p>
<p>This is a different issue. Thanks to the proliferation of middle-school participation in talent searches that require the SAT/ACT, many student records now stretch back a long time. MIT is in the peculiar situation of rejecting students whose 7th grade SAT scores are higher than the 11th grade scores of students they admit. To the best of my knowledge, this is true within a single demographic group. </p>
<p>I do think that students will grow rapidly when in a challenging environment. However, I canât come up with any reasonable model of intellectual growth that suggests that the two (if both admitted) would wind up anywhere on par by the time of college graduation. It also seems unreasonable to me to suggest that the two are capable of handling âthe workâ at any similar level. </p>
<p>I donât have a hang-up about an 800 SAT math score. Some of the USAMO qualifiers do not have that. On the other hand, I think that a student who is capable of handling the work at MIT should be able to score at the âtwo-errorâ level (variable by test date) with 2 or 3 tries at the SAT M; otherwise, I think the student will run into difficulty with the introductory math and physics courses at MIT.</p>
<p>5) Lack of understanding of qualifications that [most of] the admissions staff didnât have when they applied: Since Pizzagirl brought up the USAMO mathematics competition earlier, let me comment on that. We know that the USAMO qualifiers are geographically concentrated, and mostly male. In many school districts, the tests that lead up to USAMO may not be offered. Some strong mathematicians do not view math as a competitive sport, in a timed arena. So not qualifying for USAMO does not indicate a lack of talent or potential. </p>
<p>On the other hand, in the districts/schools where students do qualify for USAMO on an intermittent or regular basis, very few of the students actually qualify for it. The fact of qualification represents something significant about the developed skill of the high school student, in my opinion. </p>
<p>Elsewhere, collegealum314 has noted that the AIME (the pre-USAMO test) is coachable, and can yield to âbrute force,â in effect. So perhaps I should revise my opinion to say that scoring points on the USAMO itself means something significant. There are so few students per year who do that, and so many admissions places open at MIT, that I personally think MIT should take them all, barring character defects or other obviously disqualifying elements of the records. </p>
<p>I donât see any need for HYPS to take them allâtheir missions are different, and mathematical insight is irrelevant to many of the careers for which their students are preparing.</p>
<p>QM: I read the same material you did, and I didnât come away at all with the notion that MIT was punishing students who happened to walk into the SAT and get a 2400 score. What I got â and what I think there are lots and lots of students and parents on this website who need to hear â is that there is no advantage to re-taking and re-taking the SAT to push your 2300 to 2400, and that doing that raises questions about what you care about and how you choose to spend your time. I think at most elite US universities, not just MIT, re-taking the SATs more than once after scoring 2300 or better would be seen as a character issue. And there is a real subculture of applicants who do that, and who mistakenly think it makes them more attractive candidates for admission.</p>
<p>As for the failure essay, you know perfectly well that the examples you describe (and explaining why that wasnât really a âfailureâ) are perfect for that prompt. I donât see any problem with MIT giving extra points to people who can discuss their experience in a moral frame, or to people who have found ways to challenge themselves beyond their natural abilities even when that is difficult. Those are two pretty meaningful real-world abilities, and I would hardly be surprised if they correlated with success at MIT and beyond.</p>
Not only that but if they sat down and read the applications in a different order they might accept the debater from Andover, the oboe player from Alaska and the Intel winner from New Orleans. Thereâs a reason for accepting each kid, but thereâs no way of deciding that oboe players are intrinsically more interesting than tubas, unless of course, someone in the music department has informed the admissions committee. (Which may happen at smaller schools - less likely at the bigger Ivies IMO.)</p>
<p>Re JHSâs post #949âI agree, mostly. However, I think that MIT is looking for actual failure, as opposed to things that werenât really failures at all. I am pretty sure that MIT doesnât want to hear about the studentâs not winning anything in the Intel competition in response to that question, no matter how that answer is couched. </p>
<p>The idea of falsely portraying a strength as a weakness in response to a job interview question has already been skewered in Dilbert and elsewhere. So I donât need to go into that.</p>
<p>The failure essay could backfire on a student in so many ways. If itâs a true mistake kind of failure, then the applicant might shoot himself in the foot as far as making a good impression on the admissions staff. If itâs a fake failure, like building an entire car motor in the garage which doesnât start the first time, then the student runs the risk of demonstrating false modesty or not enough failure.</p>
<p>That said, if I were an admissions officer at a top school, Iâd like to see some evidence of failure for one reason: so Iâd avoid accepting the type of student who might commit suicide the first time academic adversity strikes. Suicides are tragic in many ways of course, but are particularly bad press for colleges and universities. An incident can makes the school seem like an impossible pressure cooker or a place where students are depressed. At Dâs school (HYPS) last year, a beautiful young lady killed herself after learning she had failed to achieve an important goal. Itâs quite possible, given how highly accomplished their students are, that this was the first time she had really âfailedâ at something big.</p>
<p>And yes, of course I understand about the sudden onset of mental illness and that handling previous failure is no guarantee of current mental health, etc. But I still wonder if this isnât one reason for that question. There are a lot of high-strung super-star students out there who already cut themselves, have eating disorders, or engage in other self-destructive behaviors out of the stress of having to be perfect enough to get into the schools their parents value.</p>
<p>This may be an example of corrupt humanities-thought vs. pure STEM-thought, but I think MIT is looking for some sign of a candidateâs ability to reflect on his or her own experience and turn it into a persuasive story â which, as I said, is a pretty important skill that highly successful people tend to have. I donât think MIT cares whether the âfailureâ is real or not, and Iâm sure a well-thought-through and well-written essay about what I learned by not winning Intel would do the trick fine. (In part because such an essay is probably rare as henâs teeth â the candidates who could write it find something else to write an even better essay about.)</p>
<p>Imo, MIT isnât looking at the actual failure, details about that failure. Thereâs no sense that failing to win Intel makes a kid more worthy because itâs Intel. </p>
<p>Itâs what you choose to discuss, how you present it, what perpective and balance it shows- and whether the answer shows enduring strengths (that they like and want.) Itâs a lens. Itâs not an absolute. What you write, how you write it, itâs relevance to the challenges in college and the personal strengths that work at that college, can speak volumes.</p>
<p>I do think MIT is interested in students who have been willing to take risks of some type, and failure is an inevitable part of risk taking.</p>
<p>Iâd be worried about a candidate who is either so risk averse or so unable to engage in meaningful self-reflection that they couldnât come up with a single instance of personal or professional failure. I also wonder if MIT and other schools use this question to weed out the students who define failure as a 2380 SAT or rail at that unfair teacher who gave them an A- instead of the coveted A.</p>
<p>For what its worth they need to accept all cowbell players. More cowbell just could not hurt. :p</p>
<p>Self reflection is an important requirement for someone entering a school like MIT. How you reflect it it goes to your character.</p>
<ol>
<li> You work hard and did not make the cut and it could be anything(not many win Intel prizes or even compete)</li>
<li> what did you do after that - swore never to try that again, chalked it up to bad methodology and restarted the process, blamed someone else, or ended your essay with life sucks and we all die?</li>
</ol>
<p>Essentially how you end the essay is what it is all about as opposed to what you consider a failure. IMHO, not winnng Intel prize is nothing close to being a failure.</p>
<p>âNow, post-Tiger-mom, I can sympathize a little more with Marilee, seeing the presumably generalizable cost of a familyâs trying to turn a top 1-3% student into a top 0.01% student, but nevertheless, in those cases, the student is the <em>victim</em> of the child-rearing philosophy, and should still be treated in a thoughtful fashion.â</p>
<p>Interesting angle indeed. I have not thought along this line.</p>
<p>I guess that if the URMs have been given the âbenefitsâ in admission because of historical/racial/cultural/economical/⊠factors, which I am a BIG supporter all these years, we may need to be broader minded when we consider the Korean American/Chinese American/Indian American/⊠applicants as well.</p>
<p>Personally, I think that a student who told MIT that he/she didnât win an Intel prize, and that was a âfailure,â is just being ridiculous. Butâjust my opinion based on what Iâve readâI think MIT is looking for genuine failure, not faux-failure, no matter how reflective the student is.</p>
<p>But then I wonder: What story of a failure does an applicant want to share with an unknown reader that (most likely) he or she has never met? Does being trusting, bordering on gullible, help qualify a person for MIT? Iâve failed a few times. Not talking about itâeven though I feel that I know some of the posters here pretty well.</p>
<p>The suicides at MIT have been tragic, absolutely. And I understand the wish to avoid admitting those who are risk-averse or brittle perfectionists. </p>
<p>However, the MIT suicides that I have read about rarely had academic problems at their roots. In the singular case I have read about, where one probably did have an academic problem at its root, it seems to me that the academic problem would have been predictable, and could have been prevented if the admissions staff talked to the people who teach the introductory math and physics course more often and set the academic component of the admissions standards accordingly. </p>
<p>I donât mean to be callous in thisâI understand how horrific the situation is, for everyone involved. But if this is the source of the failure question, I donât think MIT admissionâs analysis has run deep enough.</p>