<p>I know one young man whose mom worked essentially full out for a number of years putting together quite a grandiose service project that received some national attention. She was quite matter-of-fact about all the emails she was sending out coordinating the effort, all pretending to be her son, etc. It worked! He got accepted at some Ivies but went with the big scholarship at Duke/UNC for all those super humanitarian kids.</p>
<p>Yeah. I need to get my last one launched so I can get away from all this stuff. It’s insane.</p>
<p>"In other words, acceptance rate for legacies is 30%, "</p>
<p>The legacies vary too. Harvard says only undergraduate parents are legacy which rules out first gen immigrants who mostly do graduate studies. The fallacy of the idea is that the parents are expected to have gone there first, which rules out probably 99% of first gen immigrants.</p>
<p>"May the best liars win! " Ambivalence has never been called lying but the most determined students do change their minds.</p>
<p>An adcom story at Johns Hopkins - White kid admitted from Calif, did three summers of research/internships etc in medical field and at hospitals in high school, knew exactly what he wanted to be as a doctor down to fellowship and super specialty on the first day of college (she had talked to him while he was in high school, admitted him etc and still keeps up with him after leaving JHU). Shows up in adcom’s offce a month later and says there is no way he is doing medicine, needs to get out of premed and needs to find another career quick. As of last summer, was in law school in California.</p>
<p>Plenty of non-URM people enter the Ivy League without have such a score. Do Brown and Dartmouth place great expectations on Math SAT scores? Does Cornell? </p>
<p>Fwiw, while the scores on this subject are important at MIT, they have little to no relevance at Stanford since there is no requirement to even have SAT Subject Tests.</p>
<p>At my kids high schools that send many to the Ivy League, Math II is sort of a defacto standard subject test. It is very gently curved – an 800 is only an 88th percentile so it’s clearly nothing like the SAT reasoning test math section.</p>
<p>Interestingly, I think most selective schools – not Stanford, though – are asking for two subject tests in addition to the ACT. That has changed since my older one applied.</p>
<p>Required? No. A good idea? Yup.</p>
<p>Yale, like Stanford, will accept just the ACT but requires to 2 subjects with the SAT.</p>
<p>lima - the 800 on the math subject test is a beautiful thing – llamas or no llamas.</p>
<p>It’s just not a particularly rare score in comparison to 800s on other tests.</p>
<p>I would say if you are not hooked in any other way and have to point to an 800 on the math subject test as your big testing exploit – then definitely talk up the llamas.</p>
<p>The exceptions are for Yale, Penn and Brown where if you take ACT with writing, no SAT IIs are required. If you take SAT I, then you do need 2 SAT IIs.</p>
<p>I don’t understand why the SAT II curves are all over the place. You get 99 percentile in History subjects but 90 or below in sciences. Is it that fewer people take them and they are still trying to award a certain number of perfect scores or collegeboard also does n’t much care for STEM subjects?</p>
<p>I didn’t participate in Intel, but it’s not faked by parents. It’s true that generally you work in a research group so it is most often not independent work per se. It is more like doing work as a grad student in a research group. Have you done research? I think your cynicism is a bit misplaced.</p>
<p>my mom took one around the neighborhood during the presidential election that she named the Obama llama, he was quite popular and there was no spitting! btw, it wasn’t my idea and I didn’t write about it on my apps.</p>
<p>fwiw-I didn’t get a perfect 800 in math on SAT 1 but I did get a perfect 36 in math on the ACT :)</p>
<p>If I remember correctly, Harvard has reduced its SAT II requirement from 3 tests to 2, and the exalted UCs will no longer require them starting next year, I think.</p>
<p>So much for test scores becoming more important.</p>
<p>xiggi - I have long been a little questioning of the Intel contest. Have known of high schools with extraordinary lab fascilities and faculty pretty much devoted to getting kids to Intel, they are like Intel factories. Then there seem to be so may kids who with all this passion for independent scientific research, who just happened to have access to a lab and mentoring – and, oh that’s right! Mom is a professor in biochem at the U!</p>
<p>And you can extend the cynicism even to Olympiad. How many kids who make it very far in that esteemed contest did not get tutored heavily in math and/or science from avery tender age? We’ve had three come thru our old high school (and yes, all Asian) and my kids were quite good friends with one of them and his parents were very frank that the boy worked enormous hours every week getting prepped for Olympiad.</p>
<p>is this bad? I dunno. Olympic athlete kids do the same and we glorify that.</p>
<p>As I get older I get more and more uncomfortable with the whole parent involvement in these exploits. That is why I’d really love to see the controlled timed writing component to the application.</p>
<p>Bay - while it is true Harvard cut it to two, they have language in FAQs that I interpret as more the merrier which probably drives the kids to take a bunch more.</p>
<p>Which SAT Subject Tests should students take?
To satisfy our application requirements, applicants must take two SAT Subject Tests. Students should not submit two Subject Tests in mathematics to meet this requirement. Candidates whose first language is not English should ordinarily not use a Subject Test in their first language to meet the two Subject Tests requirement. . Applicants may wish to convey the breadth of their academic interests by taking tests in different subjects. All students are encouraged to submit additional Subject Tests (which may include one in a student’s first language), Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate test results, or any other evidence of the breadth and depth of their academic accomplishments.</p>
<p>I don’t think this would really work either (if we’re trying to prevent gaming the system). Many students memorize several “polished” essays and then tweak them according to the prompt. Don’t you think the private college counselors would be all over that?</p>
<p>I agree, but we also have to assume that the number of cases where parents “cooked” the EC to such extent remains extremely small in comparison to the total number of applicants. This is probably similar to the number of parents who have not hesitated to hire “packagers” who believe in stretching the truth, or micromanage their children a la Chua.</p>
<p>Regarding the essay, limabeans01 is absolutely correct. When the SAT II Writing existed, a very successful tutor in Newton, MA developed an idiot-proof method to ace the essay component and made the test trivial.</p>
<p>Exactly right. (And yes, it is UC’s Application Year 2011.) I have stated here on CC (when that decision came out) strong disapproval. I do not find the decision supportable, not by any stretch, not for any reason. The Comprehensive Review policy is sufficient as it stands, without eliminating one of the few distinguishers between those who can do advanced level (college) work and those who cannot. I have been argued with on CC about this, but I maintain my position.</p>
<p>Generally, to do real research you need a real lab. A high school lab is not enough, so the high school is generally irrelevant. (I went to one with probably the best high school lab facilities in the country (e.g., we had an nmr machine), but they were for teaching. No one did lab research there.) If you do something on your own that is a valid project, then obviously you will get extra credit in the competition. </p>
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<p>If you are talking about math olympiads, it takes a high threshhold of talent to do well in them. The coach of the U.S. math olympics team also coached my high school math team, and neither I nor a guy who later was offered a job as an engineering professor at MIT were able to make USAMO. Without a doubt, it takes much more talent to make MOSP than it does to get straight A’s in math and physics at a school like MIT or Harvard. If you are a physics major at MIT, you spend many hours learning the material. Still, mastering it takes talent and does mean something. It doesn’t make sense to be more cynical about the math olympiad than it is about doing well in a math major in college. </p>
<p>I think your athletic olympics analogy is apt. </p>
<p>Also, I would caution people against disregarding student research if their parents are biochem professors. More likely, they have the same interests and research. And regardless, anyone can get a job as a researcher in a lab.
Research is most often an apprenticeship. You gain independence by degrees. Sometimes a high school student that comes along and does something in his/her garage, but that is rare. The math projects tend to be more independent, however, and thus are more impressive.</p>
but I did get a perfect 36 in math on the ACT :)</p>