<p>The intent of my comment about Berkeley was just to acknowledge coolweather’s point that Berkeley admissions operate differently from what I was writing about, and to say that other participants on the thread are probably not writing about Berkeley specifically, either.</p>
<p>Going back to lookingforward’s remark about people viewing admissions personnel as “a bunch of dumb clucks”–that’s far from the case!</p>
<p>I think that admissions personnel are in general very good at reading between the lines of letters of recommendation, and picking up nuances that the writers have in mind–even nuances that the writers didn’t think had made it into the letters.</p>
<p>However, I don’t think that the admissions personnel necessarily know the “why” of the nuances. People are complex. The interactions between teachers, GC, and any individual student are also complex; and they can be affected by events that happened before the student was even born!</p>
<p>It doesn’t seem plausible to me that the admissions personnel know certain of the relevant (major) factors that may have influenced GC/teacher/student interactions, when I myself don’t know all of them, despite paying quite a lot of attention to what was happening locally, and being right here all the time over many years (well, most of the time, anyway).</p>
<p>It wouldn’t make sense for me to guess that I know the sole outlier, in terms of admissions decisions. That would be a real case of “special snowflake” exceptionalism. Also, I’ve read CC for quite a while, and have seen a few cases that look similar (at least superficially).</p>
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<p>It is just the reversing of the buyer/seller relationship. The employer sees a number of sellers willing to sell labor for the given price (wage/salary) and selects between them. Therefore, they apply some form discrimination* to choose those whom they want to buy labor from. This is not unlike how selective colleges apply some form of discrimination* between students willing to buy its service, since the students bring something other than tuition money to the table (better students tend to give colleges more prestige, which the colleges desire).</p>
<p>*In this case, “discrimination” does not necessary mean *illegal<a href=“or%20otherwise%20generally%20considered%20to%20be%20undesirable”>/i</a> discrimination. Discrimination could be on the basis of job skills, for example.</p>
<p>The adcoms are people with their own prejudices and POV’s.</p>
<p>We attended an educational event where parents were handed three applications and asked to choose whom to admit, reject and WL. The sessions were moderated in small group settings by adcoms from actual colleges.</p>
<p>In my case the group made their decision only to be met with actual hostility from the moderating adcom. The long and short of it was she was going to admit the applicant we WL’d and it was clear that her reasons were based on a particular political activity (for a particular party) in which the applicant had participated. </p>
<p>When all the small groups gathered and gave their results…it turns out our original decisions were in line with the general consensus. It was glaringly obvious that our adcom had a personal bias which she could not or would not over ride. </p>
<p>And that folks…is when it became clear it was a cr@p shoot.</p>
<p>UCB: point well taken. I do think the employer/employee and adcom/applicant relationships are different and the analogy has it’s limits and faults.</p>
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<p>I completely agree with this. Sometimes the best “fit” for a college or university is the creative misfit who can disrupt conventional ways of thinking. Some elite schools seem to go out of their way to find quirky, talented applicants who don’t fit the well-rounded “hale fellow, well met” mold. But they’ll only identify them through a holistic admissions process. This is also true in some businesses, by the way, especially those looking to develop disruptive technologies or business models. “Fit” in an organization, be it a university or a business, doesn’t always mean “fitting in,” especially if that organization is seeking to be a creative force. Creative misfits are often the yeast that’s needed to make the bread rise.</p>
<p>Good points, bclintonk–an amplification and more finely differentiated version of my quick remark.</p>
<p>That’s silly, dietz. The slots aren’t “offered on the open market.” I can’t waltz into Harvard with a 2.0 and 1700 SAT’s and dangle my moneybags and say “I can afford to pay the price, you can’t refuse my money.”</p>
<p>Catching up but want to say that I am still considering QM’s ideas about uber bright kids in some fields. And the, how to put my response. I don’t read for Berkeley. But I do know Stanford is reviewing for their own set of wants, likes and needs. I don’t know if we touched on S in that MIT thread.</p>
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<p>Maybe if the money bags contain several orders of magnitude more money than the usual tuition… (“developmental admits”)</p>
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<p>Look at U Chicago’s use of the unusual essay prompts as a way to identify this. That’s certainly holistic. SAT’s don’t identify that quirk.</p>
<p>Developmental admits are so on the margin, though. It only takes a few to make a huge difference.</p>
<p>I know someone who was a Duke alum, served on the board of trustees, was heavily involved in fundraising and raised goodness knows how much for Duke. Her 2 kids got in (one I suspect was “deserving,” the other a bit less so - he transferred after 2 years at a far-lower-level school). But yk? In the bigger picture, I don’t have a real problem with it. What she raised enables plenty of kids at Duke to have aid they wouldn’t otherwise had.</p>
<p>Also, Dietz, no one on my team is new to the U, its environment, bars, standards , needs, etc. They are not visitors.
As for creative misfits, yes, sure. But this is very difficult for a 17 yo to convey without sounding simply very contrary. Comes thru more effectively in LoRs.<br>
Q, yes a GC can limit impressions. Our reactions vary. Same for those 3 line recs some teachers send. Or those that veer off track.</p>
<p>For us, developmental admits, special discretion and what might be seen as favors, amount to less than 1%. If a kid is a wretched prospect, the dean is the one who deflects. These don’t come out of the blue. The dean has already been in conversation with those donor parents.</p>
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<p>Exactly. People are complex. So you have two choices:</p>
<p>1) Reduce them down to a number (their SAT score) and judge solely based on that. Rack and stack 'em.<br>
2) Use a holistic process – evaluate based off essays, LOR, EC’s, the whole shebang.</p>
<p>It seems like you’re arguing that holistic can’t be complete enough because of “events that happened before the student was born.” Well, what’s your alternative? It’s either rack-and-stack or holistic.</p>
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<p>Don’t remember the exact line in the movie…but something along the lines of “we’ve already identified that you are a ‘lady of ill repute’, the question is just how much you sell it for”.</p>
<p>LF
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<p>I’m not sure to what you are referring.</p>
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<p>Everyone has personal biases, dietz. I do, you do, we all do. We all have different types of students we’d have a soft spot for. There’s nothing you can really do about that unless you want to go to rack-and-stack numbers. All you can do is ensure that you think critically about your own biases and be conscious of them. Your anecdote doesn’t prove anything; just because your little teams all “had consensus” that you preferred A and the adcom preferred B doesn’t mean you were unbiased and she was biased. What you might have seen as “Oh, she wants that kid because he’s active in the XYZ Political Party,” she might have seen as “look at his leadership skills, as exhibited by what he did in the XYZ Party - and I’d say the same thing if it were the ABC Party.” You’re not the definer of neutral.</p>
<p>PG: you’re spot on in that we each have our own biases. In the situation I described it was actually a predictable outcome given the reputation of this particular institution. It was just eye opening to see the actual process in front play itself out in the open, especially given the results of the larger group (and adcoms from every other represented institution).</p>
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<p>Let’s say I am an adcom. It’s not “personal bias,” it’s “using my position as an admissions officer for Acme University to choose people I think are the best fit for the class of 20XX student body.” Presumably Acme U has hired me because they believe I am good at my job. They trust me to “get” what the university is looking for. Chances are that I myself was hired because someone’s personal bias told him or her–“you know, Sally would make a great adcom for our school…she gets the values and qualities we are looking for in our students.” I was hired over others who didn’t stand out as being as good a “fit” for Acme. This is probably why many adcoms are alums of the schools they end up working for–they have lived and breathed the campus culture and understand the mission and points of difference of their alma mater.</p>
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<li><p>Fairness is in the eye of the beholder. IMHO, as long as the evaluation process is within current legal boundaries, adcoms can set their own criteria that fit their institutional goals. </p></li>
<li><p>Transparency is desired to overcome some holistic admission “myths”. While some colleges are more forthcoming and specific, many others have been, at least so perceived, doing double-talks for various reasons. More candid explanations, in plain English, should help to demystify the process.</p></li>
<li><p>Different fields may require different set of basic qualifications, as QM has passionately argued. It is the responsibility of the stakeholders, particularly the faculty, to work with admissions on such issues. If all we do is complaining, nothing will change.</p></li>
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<p>Re Pizzagirl’s post #533: I am not sure that there are only the two choices you list. I have been suggesting reserving a small number of slots (maybe 2% of the total) for applicants who are extremely strong intellectually, and who are assessed non-holistically. By this I do not mean that issues of character don’t count–I think they should. Rather that leadership (aside from intellectual leadership), charisma, ability to be humorous . . . might not be weighted for this group.</p>
<p>I know that Harvard claims that they admit 200-300 students annually because they think that they are the “most exciting scholars” of their generation. This might be somewhat similar to my suggestion, except that I have a certain amount of skepticism about H’s claim. Do these students actually wind up as scholars? Or do they wind up in banking, law school, public service . . . ? Not that there is anything wrong at all with the shift from scholarly pursuits to those with a more active influence on society. One might even argue that the students had matured away from scholarship. In any event, I am making the suggestion with regard to a comparatively small number of “hard core” scholars.</p>