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<p>Well, why wouldn’t you expect it to be remarkably consistent over time? Would you expect the % of AA or Hispanics who are qualified for Harvard to swing wildly from year to year? If so, why more or less than any other group – tuba players, kids from the Plains States, etc.?</p>
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<p>The SAT is a relatively low-ceiling test for the smartest high school seniors – especially the math section. That is why looking at 7th grade SAT scores could have value in distinguishing among applicants to the most selective schools. I don’t expect this to be done – it would have to be announced many years in advance, and I agree that it would favor children with a Beliavsky type of parent. I do wish the SAT had a higher ceiling, as it did before the recentering. Advanced Placement exams could be scored on a 200-800 scale (while retaining the 1 to 5 scoring system – the 200-800 score would also be mapped to the 1-5 score). For math, tests such as the AMC 12, which are used informally by some schools, could be used more formally and be better publicized. My general complaint is that not enough effort is being made to identify the very brightest students in an objective way.</p>
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<p>Why, is there some problem where very bright students aren’t able to attend into very good colleges in this country? I don’t see any such problem. I recognize in certain circles it’s a crisis if the kid has to attend Tufts instead of Harvard or Vanderbilt instead of Princeton, but really, the cream always rises to the top, so what’s the problem?</p>
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<p>At any given “top school,” there are qualified students who do not gain admission. Most “qualified students” at all levels of ability will find a place in a school that provides more than adequate opportunities for intellectual stimulation and growth. I will buy a virtual beer for anyone who has information about highly qualified students who did not bounce back from rejection from a so-called top school. Forget the plural; show me *one *student who has been harmed in a meaningful and material way. If all you can come up with is someone losing out on a theoretical six-figure salary on Wall Street, no beer for you!</p>
<p>[Cross-posted with Pizzagirl]</p>
<p>Smartest boy I’ve ever heard of was a hs friends son: perfect score on SAT in seventh grade, touted as one of the top ten hs students in the country. </p>
<p>Went to Duke on a full ride. Courted by Cambridge and took an MA there in AI along with Another in Shakespeare studies.</p>
<p>Came back for PhD and was rejected at MIT to his utter shock. He was accepted at Carnegie-Melon, where he is now a member of the faculty.</p>
<p>Here’s my point: what does any of it really matter? Like some many other folks, he has studied, mastered a discipline, and gained employment. How does his extreme intelligence and list of schools he attended make his life different from anyone else’s, not do I think he would want it to be.</p>
<p>Muckdogs07 - Can you please link to where you found acceptance rates for URMs at Harvard? I can only find enrollment figures.</p>
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<p>Holistic admissions practices expand the pool of “top” applicants. For the colleges, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. </p>
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<p>See above. What would be the point of increasing “objective data” on applicants, if it won’t be used by admissions officers? If elite colleges all practice holistic admissions, (and they do), they are looking at the pool through the lens of “bright enough.”</p>
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<p>Again, if HYP or MIT wished to rack-and-stack SAT scores, they would DO so. </p>
<p>Your beef is not that they don’t know who the “brightest” students are (by your narrow definition of SAT scores). Your beef is that they simply don’t value it as the only / sole criterion, the way you desperately wish they would. </p>
<p>But don’t pretend that they wouldn’t know how to select top scorers. Tomorrow, they could decide to accept all the 2400’s who darken their doors and rack and stack the rest. Nothing stops them. Except they don’t want to. And, they don’t have to. The. End.</p>
<p>I’m just going to weigh in that I disagree with the bashing of the early talent programs. I know dozens of kids who have participated. For some, it was life-altering from a social perspective (Hey, I can get through a day without getting bullied by some Neanderthal at my middle school.) For some, it was life-altering intellectually (Hey, there is something called the History of Science and I want more of it. Or I love Number Theory even though I thought I wanted to be a Spanish teacher.) For some, it was neither-- just an interesting and stimulating and friendly place to spend a couple of weeks in the summer.</p>
<p>But if you’ve had a kid who has no friends, no social life, and feels completely marginalized from the hyper-sexed, “it’s all about being popular” experience in many schools- well, it’s a life saver for the parent and the family.</p>
<p>So stop bashing CTY.</p>
<p>Back to your regularly scheduled programming of figuring out how the math whizzes at MIT should be able to shove 5,000 extra Freshman onto a campus that can’t hold them all… especially if it’s your kid or nephew or YOU who has been denied admission.</p>
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Through EdX. I hope that online courses will reduce the stakes in selective college admissions.</p>
<p>“I have yet to see a CTY kid who explained what significant change it made in his life, as part of an app.”</p>
<p>You need meet my D. Her essay was all about CTY. She looked at small LACs where she got a CTY-like vibe when we visited.</p>
<p>Gourmetmom’s link shows enrollment during different years and they had 14 just two years ago. It is almost like no one went there in the last two to three years?</p>
<p>Interestingly enough, not a single person showed up at stanford either and the dean said Blast you Rhode Island during the convocation because it is the only state without a new student (it sounded like it is an issue on the students’ end and not the admissions end). However, he said all is well since one came as a transfer student and counts towards 2012 admission numbers.</p>
<p>[Stanford</a> welcomes Class of 2016 and incoming transfer students](<a href=“You've requested a page that no longer exists | Stanford News”>You've requested a page that no longer exists | Stanford News)</p>
<p>"Shaw said the Class of 2016 – 1,768 freshmen – is composed of 52.8 percent men and 47.2 percent women.</p>
<p>Among the incoming freshmen, 13.3 percent are first-generation students – the first in their families to attend a four-year college. International students with foreign visas comprise 7.4 percent of the incoming class.</p>
<p>He said the Class of 2016 had arrived from 55 countries and 49 states.</p>
<p>“Blast you, Rhode Island,” he joked. “But only momentarily,” he added.</p>
<p>Among 31 incoming transfer students are five veterans – of the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps – and four international students.</p>
<p>“And guess what – one is from the state of Rhode Island,” Shaw said."
<a href=“You've requested a page that no longer exists | Stanford News”>You've requested a page that no longer exists | Stanford News;
<p>No bashing of CTY or similar programs here. My kids both attended and enjoyed their experiences immensely. Enrichment for smart kids isn’t anything controversial. Focusing on SAT scores for middle-schoolers as evidence that HYP should start considering them lickety-split for evidence of Superior Genius More Deserving of Admissions is. </p>
<p>The real question is – who <em>really</em> wants the Superior Geniuses admitted into HYP, etc.? Is it HYP – or the parents of such Superior Geniuses?</p>
<p>The paper </p>
<p>Park, G., Lubinski, D., & Benbow, C. P. (2008). Ability differences among people who have commensurate degrees matter for scientific creativity. Psychological Science, 19, 957-961</p>
<p>I mentioned in a previous post</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/14992442-post888.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/14992442-post888.html</a></p>
<p>explains why early SAT scores can be of value.</p>
<p>Not sure what’s going on in little Rhode Island, but it is true that many people here don’t like to travel far…the state can be traversed in 45 minutes, so they’re probably spoiled. My son considered applying to Stanford, but thought it was too much of a long shot because his G/C told him they rarely accept Rhode Islanders. MIT, on the other hand, is in what most in my crowd consider prime real estate. I know several tippy top students who have applied to MIT over the last three or four years and only two were accepted. I went to a meet and greet last year in Providence, and the MIT admissions officer told the crowd that they usually accept about 20 from RI every year, which I find very, very doubtful.</p>
<p>^Sometimes they start cutting the numbers based on who shows up vs not, and pretty soon the number of admissions and number showing up both go down.</p>
<p>Our kids school used to have 4-5 admits about 4 years ago, last couple of years just one and both years the one did not go. So I would be curious what happens this year.</p>
<p>Can someone clairfy- when do your kids or their friends do CTY or the like? From my perspective, shouldn’t they be past that by the summer before sr year- at that point, accumulating internship or research experience? Even by the summer before jr year-??? </p>
<p>And, a kid who needs to tell that he got x score in middle school- shouldn’t there be something more accomplished in the last 3 years of hs?</p>
<p>If it’s still the same, CTY serves people who are grades 7-10, though they make exceptions on the younger end. </p>
<p>It’s not something people expect to help them in admissions. I did list it on my resume’ because I spent part of my summers there the first two years of high school.</p>
<p>It is only 3 weeks, so there is plenty of other time for other activities.</p>
<p>reeinaz,</p>
<p>Here’s the link to the statistics. To its credit, Harvard is the only Ivy that consistently reports its racial breakdown (at least that I have found).</p>
<p>[Harvard</a> University Admissions 2007](<a href=“http://ivysuccess.com/harvard_2007.html]Harvard”>ivysuccess.com)</p>
<p>Pizzagirl,</p>
<p>No I would not expect such a tight band in the statistics re racial breakdown over a decade long period. Over a decade-long period, a variance of around 2 to 3% for AA
and just a little wider band for Hispanic and Asian is extremely unlikely to happen just based on applicant pools (maybe Beliavsky could calculate a confidence interval) in the absence of soft quotas. Compare these numbers to Amherst (see brief submitted by LACs in the Fisher case) which has very wide fluctuations in AA admissions using a holistic process. Such tight bands at Harvard, which is often looked to by the S Ct on educational issues (because many of them and/or their clerks attended there), is one reason why some Justices suspect that at some top colleges holistic is simply a disguise for soft quotas.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl: The issue raised here about the middle school sat score was that it count against them in admission. I understand that this should not be a consideration in the admission, however, it should not disqualify them as well. Just because they took as 7th graders and got good scores, why should they get rejected? A punishment for being a high achiever? Or having parents who provided that opportunity?</p>
<p>And, why do most people think that if a kid takes 7 th grade SAT and scored 750 in math will not have any other achievement in the next 4 years?</p>