<p>What’s wrong with some naiviete concerning college admissions? It’s only college, a stepping stone to life ahead. Should parents be a professional at this? It shouldn’t be a rocket science, should it? Some parents think their kids belong to top institutions, having seen them excel in every area, better than anyone known in their community. How is that wrong? IMO, what’s wrong is the fact that it isn’t enough. It should be enough. It had been enough. So why is it not enough suddenly? Have kids gotten suddenly smarter through some kind of genetic engineering?</p>
<p>Re earlier discussion, in particular JHS #1519, the “disqualifying flaw” theory of the rejection of top applicants by MIT–I found Pizzagirl’s reply, which quickly followed JHS’s post to be extremely welcome. Had intended to mention that before.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl</p>
<p>“And if you don’t get that the goal of your application is to TELL A STORY about who you uniquely are, what makes you different and interesting and why you’d add to a college campus, then you’re not all that bright – I don’t care what your SAT’s are. This is just common sense America 2012.”</p>
<p>Interesting to hear about your daughter’s essay and making it memorable. I have advised my kids to do the same at their reach schools (while being a bit more conserrvatove, while still telling their story, at safeties/matches). I agree “packaging” the applicant is common sense to kids from top school districts or with educated and involved parents/counselors. </p>
<p>But what about the kids w/o those advantages? I worry that the “packaging” part of the process has gone over board with tapes/photos/and other extras being as much the rule in the application process as the exception. </p>
<p>Also, re the very bright kids that posters have been talking about at MIT, don’t you think each brigth kid is unique in his or her own way and would have somehting valuable to contribute to the college and that the final decision on admittance between such applicants should not depend on packaging? There is the stereotype of the boring grind, but I think this is more fantasy than reality and that very bright kids, including introverts, all have quirks, idiosyncracies, interesting ideas. That one applicant can express them (or their parents/cousnelor/aplication “coach” can do so) better than others should not weigh heavily in the process in my view.</p>
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<p>Actually, we took it as confirmation of randomness in the universe.</p>
<p>JHS, #1541, if you are running into a lot of “wildly arrogant jerks,” I suggest moving to Hilbert space, where we don’t have any of those.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, #1544, first part: Right, that was a student with the kicking cats line (or worse). However, JHS had just posted something similar though less graphic in #1519.</p>
<p>JHS seems to have the good fortune that the admissions outcomes of the people he knows have made sense, for the most part. If I looked only at QMP and a subset of QMP’s friends, I might easily share that view. My sample space of QMP’s friends included some who had weird outcomes, though.</p>
<p>Will try to come up with some estimates on the numbers of USAMO participants who should essentially be auto-admits in my opinion (but aren’t).</p>
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<p>My personal statements on college applications had little relation to what I did later in life, not because I was lying but I got new information about myself and the job market in college and graduate school. This is not unusual.</p>
<p>I doubt that the personal statements and essays of applicants predict much about their future achievements, but standardized tests have at least been shown to predict grades.
A system of holistic admissions values, in addition to academic achievement, the ability of applicants (or their parents or consultants) to package themselves. My ideal system would have a higher-ceiling SAT and SAT subject tests and more finely graded AP exams (instead of just 1 to 5). That system would reward the candidates who did the very best on objective academic measures, due to some combination of talent and effort. To compare the systems, two questions are</p>
<p>(1) which system results in the selection of students who become more accomplished alumni
(2) whether society is better off if students spend their time preparing for one system or the other</p>
<p>The answers to these questions are not clear-cut, but I prefer a less subjective system (and am not saying schools are obligated to adopt my preferences).</p>
<p>texaspg – "I am shocked that MIT just likes to fill up so many seats from one specialized school. Apparently, they have forgotten to “spread the wealth around”. </p>
<p>Agree with you and Pizzagirl with spreading the wealth around and looking for the diamonds in the rough. I think one reason some schools get so many slots at the top schools like TJ (a bad example because the opportunities and students there are very unique and the HS consistently gets ranked #1 across the country or gets excluded from the rankings) is that the school counselors have trust built up with various admissions offices at top schools by having sent some of their best students there for years. This creates an expectation that student X, with similar credentials as student Y who was accepted last year and attended, will also get accepted. </p>
<p>Assuming the HS and the parents hold up their end of the bargain and attend those top schools, I think even the MITs of the world are afraid to break this pattern for fear of being frozen out (or more likely steered away, since many at TJ would want to attend MIT regardless of what the counselors say). </p>
<p>Although dated, I found the most interesting part of the book, The Gatekeepers by Jacque Steinberg, on admissions at Wesleyan was how important Wes considered Harvard Westlake in LA was to its admissions process and the steps Wes took to cultivate and maintain a good relationship with this HS. I think that happens a lot, which explains (in part – as having great students does not hurt either) the big numbers for some HS’s at top colleges.</p>
<p>QuantMech – </p>
<p>I’m sorry, but I don’t think it works to run to Pizzagirl’s argument to refute mine. You have been too convincing on a set of key points, namely (a) superintelligence should matter at MIT, (b) a decent number of superintelligent applicants can be identified by objective means, and (c) there are not so many identifiable superintelligent applicants in any cohort that MIT really couldn’t accept all of the ones that apply. </p>
<p>Then Pizzagirl and blossom et al. say, “Oh no, there are so many qualified applicants and so few admission slots! It’s a lottery for everyone! Anyone can be rejected!” And that’s completely true, for the vast majority of best-in-their-school-etc. applicants. There are lots and lots of kids with great grades and great test scores and top class ranks and great ECs, and everyone who knows them thinks they are special. And they are mostly perfectly good candidates for admission, and MIT (and every other elite school) admits at least a plurality of its class from that pool. But that pool is vastly larger than a plurality of MIT’s class, and the students in it are not so special in the MIT application pool.</p>
<p>But that’s not the handful of kids the Harvard admissions dean calls “WOW” (walk on water) applicants. They do exist, and if they don’t really walk on water, they do stand out, and there aren’t enough of them to fill anybody’s class one time over, much less everybody’s class. It doesn’t work to use the “so many qualified applicants, so few slots” argument for them, because there aren’t so many of them, and there are plenty enough slots to admit them and to make certain your glee club has baritones.</p>
<p>So we are left with a limited number of hypotheses to explain the occasions – albeit rare occasions – when one of these ubermenschen gets rejected by MIT (or whoever):</p>
<ol>
<li><p>The MIT admissions staff are ambivalent about these students. They admit most of them, but set an arbitrary cap on the number they will admit, so some superapplicants get rejected. And within this possibility, there is a question how the staff distinguish among the superapplicants – do they choose whom to reject by lottery, or do they make judgments about which ones they would rather have at MIT?</p></li>
<li><p>The MIT admissions staff can’t or won’t tell the difference between superapplicants and regular applicants. They don’t value demonstrated intelligence that highly. It’s just one factor, like social engagement, or garrulous personality. These kids will be in the overall pool with average admissions chances.</p></li>
<li><p>The MIT admissions staff does value demonstrated intelligence, and does admit most of the applicants who show it. a few are left out because their applications show some kind of red flag.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>It’s tough, but #3 is the only one that makes sense to me.</p>
<p>"Actually, we took it as confirmation of randomness in the universe. "</p>
<p>I am beginning to wonder if the school is on some kind of a blacklist at MIT. The proximity to MIT with no admissions for 15 years makes no sense.</p>
<p>muckdog - I was only saying it in jest. It is known that some schools and colleges have these kinds of relationships. Boston Latin sends a large number to Harvard but there is supposedly a little known school in Cambridge which gets double admits too by being local. If a college deems some feeder schools worthy of high number of acceptances, we cant do much about it.</p>
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<p>No one has said that your personal statement on college apps has to bear any relation to what you do later in life. It’s not about what you do, it’s about who you are, at least in that moment in time. No one is looking for your personal statement to be “and then I’ll become the world’s bestest engineer / investment banker / dogcatcher.”</p>
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<p>I think overall students who attend the best high schools are disadvantaged, because they would have had higher class ranks at other schools, as discussed in the paper below:</p>
<p>[The Winner-Take-All High School:
Organizational Adaptations to
Educational Stratification](<a href=“http://www.asanet.org/images/members/docs/pdf/featured/attewell.pdf”>http://www.asanet.org/images/members/docs/pdf/featured/attewell.pdf</a>)
by Paul Attewell
Graduate Center, City University of New York
Across the United States, families seek schools with reputations for academic
excellence for their children, assuming that such schools improve a talented
childs prospects for college admission. This article shows that students from
star public high schools experience a disadvantage in entering elite colleges
that stems from the attention played to class rank.</p>
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<p>As with everything, there are tradeoffs. My kids attended what I would term a good, reasonably affluent public hs - but a rung below the New Trier type. From an elite admissions standpoint …</p>
<p>Advantages:<br>
- Not competing with 25 of their classmates. Indeed, for D’s school, our school was “fresh meat” as I don’t think anyone had ever applied there before – or if so, few and far between.
- No social pressure from either teachers or fellow students of “you’ve got to go to an Ivy League / other top school”</p>
<p>Disadvantages:<br>
- Guidance counselors not knowledgeable about / plugged into elite school networks
- Some teachers not as savvy about what a rec should look like (“Pizzakid is a hardworking student” isn’t the compliment you think it is)
- Less institutional support for / knowledge about things like talent searches as well as things like USAMO, Intel, etc.
- Elite college didn’t visit the school – they visited New Trier and the like</p>
<p>JHS, I wasn’t so much using Pizzagirl’s statement to refute yours, as I was appreciative that Pizzagirl did not accept the explanation (“red flag”) now labeled as #3 in your post #1568. </p>
<p>On the other hand, I agree with you and not with Pizzagirl on one of the points: there are not so many applicants in the category I am talking about that it is impossible for a top school to take all who apply.</p>
<p>I don’t have a connection to MIT admissions, and so have no way to guarantee my statements. But I will say that I have only encountered one or two students who were rejected by MIT, posted on the results thread, and thereby revealed some unattractive personal qualities. There are probably more, whose posts are scattered around CC, rather than being made directly in the MIT forum. I keep dragging up the posters piccolojr and hopelessly devote; however, they are two examples of students rejected by MIT where all signs are apparently positive.</p>
<p>Then there are the small number of MIT applicants I know personally who were waitlisted at best. (Some were admitted.) I guarantee that there should have been no red flags on their applications, based on their characters or any other aspect of their record to that point. I didn’t read their essays, but I know them well enough to believe that they should have been pretty good. I also know the teachers who wrote letters for them, and there could have been no doubt about their enthusiasm.</p>
<p>So if you are right about #3, this leaves me with a limited locale for the “red flag.” Two possibilities suggest themselves to me:
- The offspring of dual Ph.D. couples are held to an incredibly high standard of accomplishment, in an attempt to level the playing field. Maybe the students needed to be hyper-amazing (e.g, Gabriel Carroll, Poh-Ru Loh), while I have just been talking about amazing students.
- Something was wrong with the GC letter. I don’t like this explanation, because it suggests that the GC accidentally or even purposefully failed to provide the appropriate support for the student (cf. Pizzagirl’s disadvantages 1 and 2 in #1572). One might guess about what had gone wrong–if anything had–but that’s getting too speculative for a public forum.</p>
<p>Muck, not “packaging” - again, that’s a gimmicky hs view of what makes someone great. BUT we are talking abut your application “package.” Ie, all components asked for, each conributing to the sense you are a good match. It’s not rocket science to read an admissions page.</p>
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<p>I am curious as to what “red flag” marked my son at MIT? Because he attempted to enter and win one of the only significant competitions available to him (the Siemans AP Award)? When you attend a school that has no history of attending major competitions, no mentors for doing so, and little track record with top schools outside the Midwest, what are you suppose to do to prove yourself? Now let us add to that the fact that he was working 7 days a week to finish in 3 years and also get his “extras” in place. Finally, he only had about 14 months from the time we began to understand how the admissions game is played and his actual college application. Given the available time and his environment, there was absolutely nothing more he could have done to show his abilities and his strong interest in math and science.</p>
<p>I really have trouble with the “red flag” argument: He was accepted RD early-write by both Williams and Amherst. Clearly, they didn’t see an issue. He was also accepted to Northwestern’s elite ISP (Integrated Science Program), which has to be as hard for a tech geek to get into as MIT. The ISP program had very strong appeal to him, but it didn’t seem possible to combine that program with a CS degree, his first love. The people running ISP obviously didn’t see an issue.</p>
<p>I think your “red flag” implication is baloney – not just about my son, but others who didn’t get in – you really don’t have to be flawed to be turned down! I would guess that the combination of my son’s Questbridge application, 3-year graduation, and eagerness to set his own path, plus coming from a school with no recent (if ever) MIT track record placed him in the running but ultimately below the cut-off. He fit every possible aspect as described in their literature, but I’ll bet he didn’t exactly fit either part of their acceptance profile, which ultimately favors either URMS or students from wealthier school districts.</p>
<p>Fine, some SATs predict college grades (most often, I see this as soph coll grades.) Now what? So what? </p>
<p>JHS, H says it has 3x the number of finalists as slots. That’s not “good in hs,” that’s qualified for H, fit and thrive. Kids can lose based on geo diversity, seats avail in a major, all sorts of considerations that are not negatives in the kid. The kids who messed up their chances do not hit that finalist pool.</p>
<p>IF a kid is at any loss for attending one of the most exclusive preps (usually boarding,) it is the acknowledged level of facilitating and marketing the kid’s greatness those schools do, known to adcoms. Eg, the little question of how may vals or how top 3% is calculated.</p>
<p>How do people know what came through in a kid’s essays, btw? I’ve seen many that would be brilliant hs theses (not what is asked for) or outstanding and touching tribes to grandpa (not revealing about the kid,) or whatever. I’ve seen kids who actually tell negatives- the sort of thing any parent or teacher would flag.</p>
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<p>Certainly not the case with my son. Although each GC at my son school’s had 300+ students to take care of, my son’s GC did a lot to get him approved for outside classes, including proctoring mid-terms and finals for my son’s online classes. I saw his recommendation and it was exceptional. One line on the form said to describe the candidate in a couple of words. The answer was “brilliant and driven.”</p>
<p>LoremIpsum, recent posts: In all honesty, I believe that the sole reason your son was not accepted by MIT was that he did not fail convincingly enough (not becoming the male Siemens AP Scholar for his state). In the category of “baloney,” I’ve already called that question “baloney,” although not in so many words.</p>
<p>My statement about a possible issue with the GC letter applied purely locally, to one of QMP’s friends. I have no way of knowing. It would be nice not to harbor any reservations about it. Haven’t reached that point.</p>
<p>QM, as I have said before, my son is at a school that he loves, and the MIT rejection is now irrelevant from our standpoint. Yet for everyone who posts here, there are 10 silent readers. I really want those parents to know that kids get rejected just because there is not enough room for everyone, not because their kid’s application, letter of recommendations, or personality was somehow defective. It’s all to easy to believe the adcoms are all-knowing and to accept guilt or blame for being “inadequate,” when that simply is not the case.</p>
<p>edit: it looks like it’s more like 100 silent readers per poster.</p>
<p>LoremIpsum: I am nowhere near as reasonable as you! Even though my kid is now through his PhD, I’m still pretty ticked off at MIT.
:)</p>