<p>coureur, did you read my post or just jerk your knee?</p>
<p>The assumption I made was that there are brilliant people with 3.9 GPAs and brilliant people with 3.4 GPAs, and of course non-brilliant people at both GPA levels, too. Many, many more than the brilliant people. Hardly any of the kids considered brilliant in their high schools, by their friends and family, are truly brilliant.</p>
<p>Of course, no one questions whether Harvard should admit the brilliant 3.9 student. That kid is already in, for sure. The issue is whether Harvard admits the brilliant 3.4 student in preference to yet another run-of-the-mill high performer, who will likely remain a high performer all his life, bringing great credit and many contributions to his alma mater, whatever it is, and who is likely a great person in every way.</p>
<p>I don’t think there are enough really brilliant people out there for this to be much of a choice, especially since no one is going to argue for admitting people, no matter how brilliant, who are truly incapable of succeeding at Harvard. I think you admit all of the brilliant people you can, and then fill the other 1600+ class slots with non-brilliant high performers of various stripes. I doubt the Harvard admissions office feels any differently.</p>
<p>Brilliant is highly overused at the high school level, and the undergraduate level, as well, for that matter.</p>
<p>Also, it is not always as easy to “spot” in the CV of a senior in high school as it might be assumed by some on this thread. By it’s very nature, the unconventional is annoying and undervalued by the average high school teacher who, quite frankly, and no offense to high school teachers, has no idea if something is brilliant or merely something they have not yet thought of themselves and do not actually understand.</p>
<p>Einstein’s final grades work out to a 5 on a 1 - 6 scale. Thus, he would be a “brilliant 3.4.” Why accept someone who’s excellent in math, good in science and his native language, passable at drawing and geography, and poor in foreign language?</p>
<p>@poetgrl: Forget about high school teachers! Even the ‘brilliant geniuses’ of one generation often have a difficult time in recognizing the ‘brilliant geniuses’ of the next! </p>
<p>@Periwinkle: Harvard likes some ‘lopsided’ students. Maybe not for the majority of the class, but certainly for a portion. Some people are obsessed about a few things at the expense of everything else, and that’s not always bad.</p>
<p>Some of us less-than-brilliant less-than-geniuses have a pretty good track record of spotting the appreciably-more-brilliant closer-to-geniuses in our own fields–but depending on field, may not ever work in admissions.</p>
<p>It’s probably impossible to talk about einstein, given what we already know about him. Either way, we are influenced by this.</p>
<p>But, there is no doubt that many did not “get” his brilliance at the time. That’s about all that can be said with any clarity.</p>
<p>There are actually better, less famous examples of this, and if I didn’t have to go to work, I would put them down, now. However, being able to spot talent is a talent in and of itself, and not everyone has that in equal measure, either.</p>
<p>Brilliance: I have a friend I have known for many years. She was first in her class in college (one of HYPS) and first in her class in law school (also one of HYPS), and in between got a PPE MA at Oxford that reportedly had the highest score anyone had received since sometime in the 1920s. She has had the most interesting career of anyone I know, although it has been restricted of late by a life-threatening illness she picked up on the job. She could get a tenured position at more than one of the single-initial universities by making clear she would accept if it were offered. She is a lovely, kind person as well.</p>
<p>Anyway, the word “brilliant” gets used all the time to describe her, by many people. But she resists it absolutely. What she says is, “I am really good at processing information quickly, I have good focus and follow-through, and good work-habits. But I am not creative at all, and I have rarely had an original idea in my life.” Neither have most other people, by the way. She reads a lot of legal and historical academic writing, and divides it into two (really three) categories: things she could have written if she had taken the time to learn the field and do the research (and a subcategory of things she could have written a lot better had she done that), and things she could not have written no matter how much time and effort she put into it. The former category is very large, the latter maybe a couple of pieces a year, and they are occasions for great joy and celebration.</p>
<p>My friend is right. She is not brilliant, and never has been. That doesn’t mean she is not an incredibly valuable person. She is. Were it not for her illness, she might well be in Susan Rice’s shoes now; she would make a superb Secretary of State. (She would make a superb Secretary of Just About Anything.) The ability to perform at her Himalayan level is probably as rare as true brilliance, maybe more so. (Probably more so.) But there was never any question about her getting accepted at college. She never posed the slightest challenge to any decisionmaker. As far as I know, she has never been turned down for anything in her life. </p>
<p>The challenge for college admissions people is recognizing the ultra-rare students who can do what she cannot: produce original ideas on a regular basis, in some form or another. If someone can do that, colleges should want her</p>
<p>If that’s the case, and people favor this, then we are on the same page. But there seems to be an underlying thought here that “conventional” classroom success itself is evidence for non-brilliance; that the truly brilliant kid can’t have good grades because s/he is just too brilliant, too quirky, and too focused in his/her own specialty and just can’t be bothered bothered to do his algebra homework. </p>
<p>The other underlying theory here is sort of the flip side - namely, the rat race for Harvard begins in kindergarten and so being pushed throughout childhood to hit all those marks of conventional academic success beats any brilliance out out of the kid. </p>
<p>Thus, thanks to the effects of these two theories, Harvard ends up every year with 1660 conventional, uncreative grade/SAT robots who are good at everything and great at nothing. The evidence of achievement by Harvard alumni across many creative fields strongly suggests that this is not the case.</p>
Assuming that Yale is the same, I would also add that what the students do creatively while they are in college also suggests that this is not the case. I suppose it’s possible that some people who are way outside the box and refused to play the game in high school don’t get in–but at most colleges you still need to play the game to some extent to succeed, so maybe it’s not so bad if they don’t go there.</p>
<p>Yeah, coureur, some other people may believe that brilliance and good academic performance in high school are incompatible, but not I. Unfortunately (for moral purposes), even extraordinary parental helicopter/tiger-mom activity doesn’t seem capable of snuffing out true genius.</p>
<p>That said, it’s not like I have met a lot of geniuses in my life, despite having sometimes been in the sorts of places they are rumored to hang out. And one of the ones I did meet turned out to have been a Nazi collaborator in his youth, so genius isn’t perfect, either.</p>
<p>Not to generalize, but geniuses almost inevitably come with extraordinary flaws.</p>
<p>Tangential observation: the college work (academic/creative) of many of the most celebrated citizens–artists or otherwise–is often underwhelming. The joke at Harvard is that the quality of Lampoon publications are awfully amateur–and this is not because I’m a former CrimEd, considering Crim pieces and even Advocate pieces are often dreadful. Somehow, some people outgrow the awfulness and go on to write/create really great art.</p>
<p>If I had an unconventionally brilliant kid I would send him or her to a place like Hampshire College over Harvard. OR a conservatory if we were talking about a musician. Conformity does not breed creativity, in my experience.</p>
<p>Agree with Hunt. Conservatories…depending on which one…can sometimes be very conformist places. For example, if someone wants to be a composer, Juilliard is not the first place I’d recommend.</p>
I think it’s pretty easy for a brilliant lopsided person to have about 3.5 or 3.6. A STEM sided person getting some Bs in English, Foreign Languages. or History … while a liberal arts type might pull some Bs in Math and Science classes. </p>
<p>My guess is some of the complaints about admissions results about are kids who are “less qualified” getting in are, in fact, lopsided kids with SATs and grades lower on their weaker side … but whose strong side was very compelling.</p>
<p>Although full disclosure requires my divulging I’m not neutral on the subject as looking at averages I was one of those admits who didn’t make sense at a bunch of the schools to which I was admitted … however I was a seriously lopsided applicant whose grades and scores on the strong side were plenty strong.</p>
<p>Wait. I think I know who you are talking about, and it is absolutely ridiculous to say she isn’t brilliant. If she doesn’t qualify, then the standard you are setting is so far off the charts that the term becomes meaningless in this context. (If we are talking about the same person, she also demonstrates the absolute stupidity in trying to use standardized test results to assess a person’s intelligence.) </p>
<p>She may not be as brilliant as, say, a David Foster Wallace, but if I were an admissions committee member, I’m not sure that I would want to admit a DFW over her. In fact, I know I wouldn’t. </p>
<p>(If we aren’t talking about the same person, then those credentials are a lot more common than I ever would have guessed! That said, I hadn’t heard that the person I am thinking of is ill, so maybe there are two or more women that meet that description.)</p>