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out of curiosity, do you feel your older son suffered horribly in his education because he attended the state flagship (I think)? Was he able to find intellectual stimulation, launch a successful career or go to grad school or do you believe he squandered all his potential by not attending a place like MIT?</p>
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<p>I agree, in general. It shouldn’t be too hard for a true wiz kid to teach himself a few AP subjects; the resources and old tests are readily available. But higher-level undergrad courses, research projects, and national science and math competitions are hard to get into, regardless of brilliance, unless you have the experience, menthorship and connections associated with wealthier school district’s.</p>
<p>@sally305
90% success is suboptimal in treating patients and in performing surgical procedures! It would also be suboptimal ( and it is) in our court system!</p>
<p>The lingering presence of Feynman’s ideas? </p>
<p>I understand QuantMech’s point. </p>
<p>I think many things can be true at the same time; that’s what makes our world so complex. It may be true that it’s silly to stress about the fates of these few stratospherically bright individuals at the same time that it’s true that one of them doesn’t get into MIT or substitute any other school for school as school X.</p>
<p>PG: While it may be true that the same holds true for your son and his lost DC connections, math genius peaks earlier and is easier to spot early on so the argument becomes a bit different.</p>
<p>Perhaps mistakenly, I thought we were debating the logic of MIT’s admissions choices and its holistic admissions policy not the fate of individual students. And further, I thought MIT was itself merely school X in the equation.</p>
<p>In the real world a baby Einstein who is denied at MIT may in fact find the perfect mentor at Princeton, Cal Tech, Cornell, … or, gasp, even Stony Brook. In the real world many factors come into play to determine whether or not a budding genius reaches his/her potential and serves him/herself and society in this way.</p>
<p>I have heard Stephen Hawking say he thinks ALS gave him the focus he needed, that before that, he wasn’t really doing much of anything but biding time at Oxford. </p>
<p>Of course, we would not wish that fate on one of our nascent scientists. However, my point is we certainly can’t account for all the variables in outcomes.</p>
<p>However, although I began the conversation in favor of our current holistic method of selecting students, I can see an argument for a stronger reward system for the very focussed young scientist/mathematician. </p>
<p>I don’t think standardized tests are the way to go because motivation and innovation are not measured by those tests. I also think that with the plethora of opportunities to participate in these endeavors in high school that we are not already doing this to a great extent. It’s true though, that sometimes a highly qualified and eager candidate is denied at the school of his/her choice. I feel fairly confident that in most cases that individual has been accepted at an equally enhancing choice, sometimes to that student’s benefit, as LI has repeatedly pointed out.</p>
<p>So I return to my question, what’s wrong? What’s broken?</p>
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<p>Likely true (and likely somewhat true for most other elite colleges to some extent).
So what does that tell you? That trying to predict the future success of students based off whatever indicators you have on hand at age 17 is always somewhat of a crapshoot, because there is more serendipity in life than what is objectively measured / predictable. You do the best you can with what you have at hand, and that’s all you can do. If it were all predictable, it would already be done.</p>
<p>The concept of serendipity in life seems to be lacking among some here.</p>
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<p>I guess our budding super-genius has to swallow his pride and trot off to Carnegie Mellon or U of Illinois and just Make The Best of It All, just like all the budding super-business-people who are looking to go to HYPD and then on to millions doing hedge funds are going to have to swallow their pride and trot off to Brandeis and Kenyon and move on, as well. Life comes with no guarantees that we’ll always get what we want, does it? </p>
<p>We could have government social planners step in and put gold stars on our geniuses and have the government grant them special favors – why, China and the Eastern bloc countries used to do that with young children who showed gymnastic promise, and look how well they did at the Olympics. Surely that’s a model worth following (tic).</p>
<p>I would agree with QuantMech just based on the experience of my S at a summer math camp. He ran across what I think is a kid who fits in the group QM is thinking about. The kid’s parents were relatively uneducated, without college degrees, and the kid went to a regular junior high. But the teachers at his school recognized his potential and helped him get accepted to an accelerated math program for junior high and high school students. This kid, coming out of 7th grade in an ordinary public school, absorbed Algebra II, Geometry, and Pre-Calculus in a couple of weeks and then the first year of Calculus in a little over one week. He was tested on all of it and received perfect or near perfect scores on every test. My S had never seen anything like it. This was not a privileged kid but an extremely talented one.</p>
<p>I remember posting this before on CC about Millikan who was forced into physics because there were no other jobs open and he was considered no biggie at the age of 40 in Physics.</p>
<p>[No</a>. 204: Millikan](<a href=“http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi204.htm]No”>No. 204: Millikan)</p>
<p>“Robert A. Millikan never meant to be a scientist. He was born in 1868 and raised in a small town in Iowa. He liked athletics and classics. His high-school physics course was a joke; and, when he went to Oberlin to study classics, his college physics wasn’t much better. But, as an upperclassman, he was asked to teach the college physics course. When he balked, he was told, Anyone who can understand Greek can teach physics. I suppose some of you might agree with that sentiment.”</p>
<p>They have the so called academies that identify kids who are considered superior through testing and accept them out of high school in India and China. Interestingly, most of those trained at the undergrad level end up in US thus depriving their own nations of this talent. Even more interestingly, they find that people in engineering are not making too much money after a while and so they move to quant fields by acquiring MBAs at Penn or Chicago and getting into wall street. The irony of the whole planning to nurture the talent. :p</p>
<p>Re Pizzagirl, post #1406: I have personally known two students who started in graduate-level math courses as college freshman, one at the University of Illinois and the other at the University of Michigan, both of which are excellent, research-intensive universities. The course did not work out well for either of them. Neither wound up majoring in mathematics. Both have been very successful; they might have switched majors in any case. But I think they would have been better off at a university where they could start out in an undergraduate class. I think they were academically prepared for the graduate course, but the fact is that there is a substantial gulf between students coming straight out of high school and students entering grad school. </p>
<p>Re warbrain #1397: I believe that in the recent past MIT has rejected students who attended MOP. (Could be wrong, but I don’t think so.) This may have changed under Stu Schmill, which is good.</p>
<p>Re Bay #1396: You are assuming that the issue was with the “life path” of the geniuses MIT didn’t take. I sincerely believe that under Marilee Jone’s leadership, the admissions office did not actually like students who had 2400 SAT scores, even if they got them by just walking in to take the exam. I think it’s possible to tell the difference between a student who needed cram school to score 2400 and a student for whom this is like falling off a log (with a little bit of luck thrown in). It gets a little tricky when you have a member of the high-anxiety crowd who may have taken a prep course that wasn’t needed. I don’t know people in that category, but have to assume that they exist.</p>
<p>Just wanted to add: alh, I welcome the help, and appreciate your posts! Also true of others!</p>
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<p>Taking AP classes and getting 5’s on AP exams, especially the harder ones such as Physics C, does demonstrate some motivation and talent.</p>
<p>Somewhere recently on CC, perhaps back many pages on this thread, a study was cited (and linked) that showed that math performance was anti-correlated with family income, at the highest levels. I find this readily believable.</p>
<p>Yes, definitely, a student needs to have access to some resources to become very advanced in mathematics. Access to the resources doesn’t produce mathematical brilliance, however. </p>
<p>A student who does not have access to academic resources can catch up in college and beyond. But it doesn’t make sense to me to think that the student can fill in all the gaps during the summer before starting college. Learning mathematics is a cumulative process. The courses really do build on each other, and building an understanding-base as well as a knowledge-base is essential.</p>
<p>I think that it is very important for the U.S. to address the inequality of educational experiences offered to K-12 students.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, post #1406: I see quite a difference between the following two situations:</p>
<p>a) Forcing a talented student to go into a pre-selected field (whether math or gymnastics or anything else), either by offering no other option or by offering such large life-style improvements to the family of the talented student–contingent on the student’s acceptance of the “gymnastics” or other mantle–that it’s very, very hard to make a free choice
vs.
b) Allowing a student who is very talented and has freely chosen an area of endeavor to develop his/her skills as fully as possible</p>
<p>Granted, there are some families who will encourage the children to go into STEM fields so strongly that the situation really fits a third category (c). This situation tends to be tricky.</p>
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<p>The Federal government spends nothing on gifted education and billions on special education. Many states make no provision for educating the gifted. More should be done to identify gifted students at early ages and to provide them with an appropriate education. There has been much discussion of whether a brilliant student who is rejected from MIT will do just as well somewhere else. A bigger problem than his being rejected from MIT may be that selective colleges in general are not as willing to accept young students as they used to be. A brilliant 12yo who has demonstrated his ability to do college work (as evidenced by SAT and AP scores) and who has exhausted the offerings of his school system may not have the extracurriculars so prized by admissions committees. A prodigy named Sho Yano had parents who made sacrifices to match his educational program with his abilities. There may be other prodigies without such parents who are whiling away their time.</p>
<p>[21-year-old</a> youngest MD from Univ. of Chicago - Health - Health care | NBC News](<a href=“http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47688745/ns/health-health_care/t/prodigy-becomes-youngest-md-univ-chicago/#.ULJfbORdZAU]21-year-old”>http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47688745/ns/health-health_care/t/prodigy-becomes-youngest-md-univ-chicago/#.ULJfbORdZAU)
A 21-year-old Chicago man who began college at age 9 and medical school three years later is about to become the youngest student ever awarded an M.D. by the University of Chicago.</p>
<p>Sho Yano, who was reading at age 2, writing at 3 and composing music at 5, will graduate this week from the Pritzker School of Medicine, where he also received a Ph.D. in molecular genetics and cell biology.</p>
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<p>I read a lot about such topics and have not seen such a study. SAT math scores increase monotonically with family income, with the kids from families with $200K+ incomes scoring the highest. Some research has found IQ to be correlated 0.4 with income, and IQ is highly heritable, so rich kids are on average smarter than middle class kids, who in turn are smarter than poor kids on average. The politically incorrect distribution of extreme intelligence is one reason not enough efforts are made to develop it.</p>
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<p>A rejection letter from MIT is not a moratorium on never-ever-ever-studying-physics-or-setting-foot-in-a-research-lab again, though. The student can still develop his / her skills fully in many other settings. It’s just one door knocked on that didn’t open. </p>
<p>I think you are far, far overstating the importance of this one university, and in that regard, it doesn’t sound appreciably different from the overwrought parents on CC who think that if their kid doesn’t get into an Ivy League, they’ll never amount to anything – or the overwrought students on CC who think that if they don’t snare a job with Goldman Sachs or Bain or McKinsey, they’ll never live any sort of meaningful life.</p>
<p>I don’t think attending MIT is vital to anyone. I just think that their admissions decisions have been particularly inexplicable, in some cases–unless one really buys into the Marilee Jones’ philosophy.</p>
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<p>I’m actually discussing a different point - not the heritability of intelligence, but the opportunities afforded by affluence. Student A lives in a well-to-do area of Silicon Valley with highly educated parents and an excellent school district. Student B is equally smart in the raw sense of the word, but lives on a ranch in Montana. Student A can present a portfolio at age 17 that includes participation in things like Intel or working in research labs, because his entire trajectory allows that to happen. Do you think Student B’s high school math teacher has even heard of Intel, or that there is a lab within 200 miles for him to work on (which he can’t anyway, since the family doesn’t have a spare car he can commandeer for a 200-mile commute)? </p>
<p>It’s not at all condemning of Student A’s accomplishments – for making the most of what he has available to him, and good for him! – to note that if you just set the bar at “accept as many Student A’s as possible, and prefer them unilaterally over Student B’s”, you miss some diamonds in the rough. And that’s part of what MIT and other elite schools apparently do in the process. </p>
<p>For all the yammering about USAMO and Intel and competitions of that nature, it seems not to occur to anybody that participation in those things is largely limited to a relative handful of high schools in this country that are set up to emphasize those things. It’s not a universal opportunity. Which doesn’t make it bad to do those things -it’s great to do them! - but it says that if you want to reward only performance in certain things, you have to be mindful as to whether those things were only accessible to wealthy people in the first place. BTW, the same thing could be said about lacrosse and water polo scholarships.</p>
<p>Beliavsky, the study was not about the SAT. It was about performance on the AIME, leading to USAMO. I will try to track it down for you when I have time. It had to do with the geographical dispersion of high scorers on these exams, which are at a higher level than the SAT M.</p>
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<p>Unless you’re privy to the totality of the application, how can you say it’s inexplicable? Maybe the person you thought was a genius wrote a tone-deaf essay that revealed him to be arrogant. Or his LORs said that he couldn’t get along with others.</p>
<p>You’re trying to explain things that aren’t explicable. Trying to “explain” is like looking at some couple in love and trying to “explain” why Susie chose Bob and not John, when John makes more and is handsomer. Well, Susie liked Bob better. That’s about all that can be said.</p>