<p>Pizzagirl, #1418–I think the student from Montana you describe could easily post a 760+ on the SAT M, and in context that would be a strong indicator. In that case, I’m not questioning taking the person from Montana.</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. "</p>
<p>I have a kid who hates to compete and blows off anything that remotely resembles a test that is not needed for graduation. I was surprised to find out the school offered some of the olympiad tests and some kids won honors etc in Chemistry while she did not bother to take the test. I am glad to see that did not impact the admissions.</p>
<p>To discriminate against folks with 2400 or even folks who need several sittings to achieve 2400 is ridiculous. Yes, the latter may merely be anxious kids who want to leave no stone unturned.</p>
<p>If that’s what we’re talking about no argument.</p>
<p>And the motivation shown by many AP’s with 5’s, research, Intel, whatever we want to throw into the hopper, is obviously valuable in assessing students.</p>
<p>PG: I don’t see the problem is acceding to the the idea that some of MIT’s decisions are inexplicable to support holistic decisions and their basic approach. I am sure some of them are.</p>
<p>The beleaguered adcoms must be bleary-eyed at the end of their process. And holistic admissions to admit geniuses (just joking a bit here) implies a very small target with a complicated rubric.</p>
<p>I have no doubt mistakes were/are made and the perfect candidate (not the greasy grind) is rejected.</p>
<p>I also have no doubt that kids without enough STEM aptitude are admitted. I feel sorry for them, because it must not be a fun place to be if the work is unbearably challenging.</p>
<p>I know that my son, is a respectable science student and earned respectable grades in his physics courses at Williams, would never have thought to apply, and if he found himself there, the way we do in dreams, he would have hightailed it out of there as quickly as he could.</p>
<p>So I am sure mistakes are made at both ends. </p>
<p>Whether or not this means the mission of admissions as a whole are flawed is another question. And whether or not this true at other schools is also a question.</p>
<p>I know from personal, anecdotal evidence that Princeton had a big push to accept artists. I’m sure there were deserving econ majors who did not make the cut because of that. </p>
<p>Perhaps MIT should operate in a different way than Princeton does; perhaps not. I think those are the questions of the thread at this point, not whether or not mistakes were made.</p>
<p>MITChris may toe the party line-- but remember, he is a voting member of the decision making party. You wanna join the club, you’d better meet the requirements and expectations- and rght now, that means some roundedness is detectable, along with certain personal qualities (beyond drive.)</p>
<p>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. A point I’ve made many times- and some don’t like.</p>
<p>Truth is, right now, if you are “all that good,” if your judgment, perspective, maturity, interactive strengths and smarts are all functoning at the right levels, you won’t submit a lackluster app. </p>
<p>Lackluster or “deadly” isn’t a mystery. Maybe more about that when I calm down. The point is, when you really are “all that good,” it shows throughout the app. And, even for kids who do “get it,” there aren’t enough seats.</p>
<p>ps. will say this for now: I do not see discrimination against 2400s. I see a hesitance about pure outliers. Not in the sense their brilliance puts them at one extreme of the Bell Curve. But, when they can’t fill out a college app in a serious and applicable way. Or can’t climb out of their own narrow comfort zones to either function with and for other humans (except their specialty group) - or even gain the expereinces which show more than their raw potential in their fields.</p>
<p>If someone is denied at MIT but accepted to Harvard - is there still a problem with the application?</p>
<p>That is quite possible. Harvard has no essay questions in their supplement while MIT has many.</p>
<p>MIT also has specific SAT II requirements for qualifying (Math II plus a science) while Harvard says any two SAT IIs.</p>
<p>did he take and extracurriculars?</p>
<p>I am curious about a super-smart kid like Evan O’Dorney, who I understand is now at Harvard. Did he apply elsewhere? Obviously the kid’s very bright - was Harvard “obligated” to take him? Do they want a class full of Evan O’Dorneys? To a broader question, to what extent do or should social skills play into who they let into a class?</p>
<p>I apologize for the glaring typos in my most recent posts; I was on the way out the door trying to get my son to the airport on time and was thus a bit rushed.</p>
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<p>If you are the only exceptional student in your school, it’s impossible to carry a makeshift team to the highest levels of competition. And the competition is tough enough that even in individual events you can’t just beat them all with raw talent alone, if you lack proper training and mentorship. </p>
<p>For example, my son used to attend math competitions against a school that had a mentor-coach dedicated to training his team. The kids on that team had a wide range of old quiz questions of every type solved and explained step-by-step (my son later accidentally found one of their sample volumes online that had been indexed by Google even though it was supposed to be in a school-only private folder). My son had none of these benefits. He would regularly sit down at a competition and find 6-7 question types he had never seen before and that looked impossible (or impossible to do quickly) at first glance. He would usually come up with his own unique solutions on-the-fly to tackle the majority of them. This effort was almost always good enough to land him a second-place ribbon, beating everyone on that team except one (a couple times he got first). </p>
<p>So on paper, he may have looked like second best, but in a research environment where no one yet knows the answer, his problem-solving approach would almost certainly make him the preferred choice for team member.</p>
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<p>You are assuming that this is the first major setbacks. Many people who are on the high end intellectually have encountered significance resistance in school to their progress and general antagonism. I’m not talking about other kiids here–I’m talking about the teachers and the school district.</p>
<p>Everybody has a tipping point–I would say, breaking point, but I don’t want to be dramatic.</p>
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<p>In the short run, yes. In the long run, maybe not. He was 14 when he started college full-time and attended the state university near our home, not the flagship. He certainly wasn’t ready to be off on his own at that age. So, in that sense, the question is moot, because he wouldn’t have been able to attend MIT anyway. We might have considered Northwestern, which was within commuting distance, but NU was too expensive for us in those days before they restructured financial aid (2-3 years later).</p>
<p>My son hated taking classes at the university, which he found slow and boring just like high school near the end. He dropped out after a couple of semesters. I guess one could say he was now a bum, because he still wasn’t old enough (16) to get a part-time job. Had he found an instructor who appreciated and nurtured his talents, it could well have made a huge difference.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, he had to do something during his waking hours. He was interested in Pokemon (went to nationals twice) and online multi-player role-playing game. His interest in Pokemon gave him some business sense; he earned spending money buying and trading select cards at competitions, then re-selling them on eBay. He also spent a lot of time on game forums and playing games online; this lead to him offering suggestions. That, in turn, lead to his promotion to moderator and eventually into programming features for games.</p>
<p>Most kids with a computer science degree can’t code their way out of paper bag; the projects they get in class are too simplistic and too limited in scope. Hardly any of them learn the first thing about web security. My son learned a great deal about security loopholes, because every time he wrote a game feature, some good-natured hacker would figure out a bypass to award himself millions in gold or armies. Fighting off hackers on a regular basis is probably the best practical web programming experience one can get.</p>
<p>The bottom line is that he learned how to program on his own and then went back to school to get a formal CS degree and to fill in a few blanks in his experience. He finished his degree just before others his age would have and started a web design and development company with his brother back in January. He moved down to Champaign-Urbana a few months back with his girlfriend and is now applying for admission to UIUC, our flagship, for a combined master’s and phD.</p>
<p>I think he would make an excellent university professor. His web development company also shows promise – some excellent work has already been done, but it takes awhile to gather enough momentum to make a living off of referrals. I doubt he will ever radically change our world, but he offers small businesses better quality for less money and, as a teacher, he may well motivate a few other brilliant capable students to reach for the stars.</p>
<p>The bottom line: no experience is ever wasted and sometimes success does not happen in a straight line. Could a helping hand at the right moment in time made a profound difference? Yes, it’s possible, but who can say for sure?</p>
<p>Mythmom, @1360,</p>
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<p>But have they come out of Harvard recently?</p>
<p>I don’t think it takes one really great teacher. For creative geniuses, it often seems to take a group of creative, like-minded people. Think of the Bloomsbury group, the Beat Generation, the Algonquin Round Table, and French Impressionism (etc.)</p>
<p>When I compare the list of notable alumni from Harvard and Hampshire, it seems Hampshire is holding its own in the creative-alumni front: </p>
<p>[Notable</a> Graduates | Harvard University](<a href=“http://www.harvard.edu/notable-graduates]Notable”>http://www.harvard.edu/notable-graduates)
<a href=“https://hampedia.org/wiki/Hampshire_College#Notable_alumni[/url]”>https://hampedia.org/wiki/Hampshire_College#Notable_alumni</a></p>
<p>Professor Vendler is posing the right questions. Introspective…lopsided…moody introvert…imperfect transcript…unsociable…interested neither in money nor sports… </p>
<p>Does that sound like the typical Harvard applicant? Does it sound like the typical accepted Harvard student? If Harvard were to accept 20 to 30 prospective creative types (in addition to however many they accept today), how loudly would the statistics-obsessed protest? Unlike the STEM super-geniuses, the children who will be creating the art of 2035 are not likely to score 800 on any part of the SAT in 7th grade. They’re quite likely to be entirely alienated from the middle school rat race.</p>
<p>Does not compute. Art is less important than STEM. Where have you been?</p>
<p>But, you can be a writing major (or minor) at MIT. Lit, too. So, they’ve got ya covered.</p>
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<p>No, I’m not assuming that. What I’m suggesting is that if an admission disappointment is your “tipping point,” you aren’t very resilient and your tolerance for adversity is rather low.</p>
<p>Edited to add: Your son sounds like a pretty cool dude, LoremIpsum.</p>
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<p>SAT scores have some random error. The “true score” (the expected average score if it is taken many times) of someone whose highest score is 2400 after 4 tries is lower than the true score of someone who scored 2400 on the 1st try.</p>
<p>“What I’m suggesting is that if an admission disappointment is your “tipping point,” you aren’t very resilient and your tolerance for adversity is rather low.”</p>
<p>And your arrogance and sense of entitlement are high.</p>
<p>I concede. I am not a Harvard apologist, nor do I have anything against Hampshire. I guess I reacted to the idea ( which admittedly you did not say) that poets don’t need to be well educated. I am a poet, and I can’t imagine being able to write without the thorough education I had. It wasn’t at Harvard.</p>
<p>When teaching creative writing, I get tired of students who think a feeling if creativity is all that’s needed.</p>
<p>I was doing Hampshire an injustice. I lived the pedagogy at Hampshire when we visited. My kids hated it.</p>
<p>Columbia/Barnard dies a great job in turning out poets.</p>
<p>I don’t understand the interest in asserting that MIT probably got it right when they rejected the excellent applicants I and others have mentioned. Why would one imagine that the applicants wrote “tone-deaf essays” that showed their arrogance, if they were rejected by MIT in the Marilee Jones era? Doesn’t her track record permit some suspicion about the validity of the decision-making?</p>