How do top scorers on tests fail to gain admission to top schools?

collegealum314 · August 24, 2007, 4:22pm

@cellardwellar: As an alum at MIT, I think it’s highly questionable that weeding out “anti-social types” is a good idea. At the age of 18, many people who will be future leaders in science are intense and serious and won’t have a warm-and-fuzzy personality. I guess eliminating anti-social types would eliminate the suicidal people, but I think you are losing a lot of good people who don’t happen to have the “right” personality. Also, from reading the MIT blogs, the personalities of MIT adcom officers seems to be drastically different than the personality it takes to get along with science people. I’ve seen people who are social butterflies get completely ostracized in grad school because people thought they were flaky despite being just as smart as everyone else. The culture is just different in science.

Also, I don’t think you’d be able to guess who was going to commit suicide. I was familiar with the circumstances of 3 of the 10 people that committed suicide at MIT while I was there. One of them was very social and seemed very cheerful and well-adjusted–I had heard that she was distraught over a relationship. Another one was harassed because he was homosexual until he jumped off the roof. Then there was a girl who was basically stalked by some guy on campus. He also got a hold of a tape of this girl and her boyfriend and passed it around campus. She complained about this guy to MIT, but the admin didn’t do anything and in fact the guy ended up living in her dorm. The implication was that this had a large part to do with her suicide. All 3 of these people probably were pretty normal, healthy people prior to coming to MIT. (BTW, the third case was written about extensively in the school newspaper and I believe the girl’s parents actually sued the school for their handling of the harassment.)

QuantMech · August 24, 2007, 4:35pm

The answer to the OP’s question depends, I think, on the definition of “top schools.” If this means HYPSM (+ Caltech, nods to Ben Golub) only, then I disagree with posts 579 by JHS, 582 by epiphany, and 598 by cellardweller. I personally know a student (in my child’s graduating class, not my child), who scored 2400 on the SAT, the first time taking it after middle school–without a prep course–and on May 1 had no admissions in the HYPSM+C group.

This is a student for whom I confidently predict a stellar career. I have known the student for 12 years, and believe that none of the disqualifiers listed by epiphany applies–at least if “bad luck” is limited to comparisons with others in the student’s high school. Of those listed by cellardweller, possibly #1 is applicable, since the student applied to just 3 of the 6 in HYPSM+C. This person has an excellent character, a 4.0 unweighted GPA, university math courses following Calc BC taken as a high school freshman, 10 AP’s (all 5’s), state-level recognition, and varsity sports participation.

It seems improbable that I know the only such student in the U.S.

Last year at this time, I would have assumed that epiphany was correct. With other strong qualifications and no disqualifiers, I would have predicted that a 2400 scorer would be accepted everywhere–even after a few years of reading CC; but experience shows otherwise.

Some top scorers (and their families) may be disappointed if they rely on the remarks in posts 579, 582, and 598. Also, if there are other such students out there, who were not admitted to “top schools,” please take heart–the assumption that the student must be to blame is wrong.

On the other hand, the odds of admission for a top scorer rise dramatically if the term “top schools” means top 25 or top 100.

collegealum314 · August 24, 2007, 4:46pm

^^which 3 HYPSM+C schools did this guy apply to?

QuantMech · August 24, 2007, 5:28pm

@collegealum314: not C; aside from that, I’d rather not specify, for privacy purposes

JHS · August 24, 2007, 5:31pm

I think if you read what I wrote carefully, it will be clear that I was NOT limiting the definition of “top schools” to HYPSM+C. Nor do I think it’s appropriate to do so. There isn’t enough educational difference between them and other schools to justify the distinction, and I’m not going to weep because a kid won’t have a chance to be in Bones or Porcellian. I don’t know that I would define it as “top 25” or certainly “top 100”, in my mind it’s probably somewhere in the “top 10-20” range (at least the schools mentioned, the rest of the Ivy League, Duke and Chicago).

However, I am surprised, as QuantMech is, by the story he tells. The kid like that in my daughter’s class applied to all six and was accepted by five of them, and another classmate with slightly lower scores applied to four and was accepted at three. Most of the kids like that whom I know wind up with multiple acceptances even in that group, although rarely 100%. I don’t doubt that there are other 2400-scorers out there who don’t get any acceptances from that group. However, I strongly suspect, where the student applied to more than one or two of them, and they all react consistently, that if we all read his application folder the problem – whatever it was – might well be pretty obvious. Despite very impressive aspects, not one person, or one committee, but several committees all passed on him. That sounds like substantive issues, not bad luck or idiosyncracy on the part of one school.

Where did he wind up? Is it a top school by your definition? Do you think others would accept it as a top school?

marite · August 24, 2007, 5:38pm

I would not expect a 2400 scorer to be accepted "

xiggi · August 24, 2007, 5:49pm

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epiphany · August 24, 2007, 5:57pm

“Rather, I would ascribe it to the strength of the applicant pool and the issue of fit.”

^^ = two concepts I included in my list, actually. The bad luck part encompasses, among other things, the strength of the applicant pool, particularly the invisible pool not from the applicant’s high school. The issue of fit I referenced in one of my points.

Reasons for rejection are many; not all (did I say) were the so-called “blame” of the student. However, I have lost count of the number of times on CC a student and/or parent has gone on about how the application was perfect, or nearly so, the student’s strengths were particularly suited to the school, etc. That is often the initial reaction of disbelief. However, when time settles in, and after discussion with & questioning by others, those with the unhappy results most often come around to understanding the reasons for the rejection, admitting that the essay, the application, even the preparation could have been better and/or the strength of the applicant pool (particularly locally, for that student) was stunning, resulting in rejections of many quality students unable all to fit into the freshman classes of the colleges most applied to.

I also would hot limit “top schools” to HYPSMC.

cellardweller · August 24, 2007, 6:02pm

Collegealum:

I don’t believe MIT is trying to weed-out everybody who is not a social butterfly. I am surethey know that many scientists and engineers tend to be introverted types and can be quite shy. That is quite different from somebody who is anti-social. As an alum you would probably agree that a strong asset of MIT is the cooperative spirit that prevails despite the heavy workload. Most projects require teamwork. I can clearly see the reasoning that MIT would prefer applicants who are willing to engage with others academically as opposed to total loners who would rather lock themselves up in their rooms. This has nothing to do with extra-curricular engagement and everything to do with ability to perform at the highest levels of science and engineering.

Drosselmeier · August 24, 2007, 7:37pm

Many kids like to claim the college interview cannot hurt them—and they are right. But, when a kid thinks in this way, even high scoring kids, they signal to me a sort of deficiency of the spirit that probably will keep them out of the top schools. The kid with verve doesn’t think as they do. Instead, he is interested in getting in really close and engaging the interviewer with ideas and questions, not so much to impress, but mostly because of curiosity. The 2100 kid with verve is gonna blow the socks clean off of a 2400 kid that is simply excellent.

Verve shows up in all sorts of ways. As my kid’s interview period began, he had just come off of a year-long study of cultural expressions and had written about two or three dozen essays on how each culture’s set of expressions are united by a single aesthetic. (Here, for example, [is</a> a glorious French cathedral, but in music](<a href=“http://www.free-scores.com/download-sheet-music.php?pdf=6249]is”>Free sheet music : Campra, André - Rigaudon (Organ solo)). Go ahead and turn up the volume a lot – until your throat rattles – and as you listen to Campra, look at the man’s dress and note how even it is driven by the same aesthetic that unites the music with the architecture. Also, try to hear the piece and unite it with a grass hut.). The boy began working on an idea that a culture’s uniting aesthetic may come from something as fundamental as land and foliage characteristics. By the time his interviews began, the kid was not thinking of how they can’t hurt him. He was dying to show someone other than his dad all the glory he had found in so many places-- places most of us would not even think to look. It was bursting to get out of his mind and into someone else’s. In many of these interviews he discussed a vast array of topics and books, not to impress, but to share. When it was all done, two interviewers from top schools later remarked that if he had not been selected at those schools, they would have lost faith in the system. That is, I think, the point of the interview. It is about “response amplitude”. You get an interviewer saying “Jimmy would be a welcomed addition to our school” and Jimmy is not likely to gain an edge because every applicant would likely be a welcomed addition. But you get an interviewer who becomes so caught up in a student, so impressed by the intellectual journey that the kid takes them on that they write “I have never met anyone like Jimmy. He is one in a million!” and the school HAS to pay attention. They have to because the kid has proven he has the stuff to command the respect and awe of a near perfect stranger.

The key to verve is a very well-fed intellect. And you feed your intellect by doing more than taking AP classes and studying for a doggone test. You get it by doing more than being president of some high-school club or by handing out socks on some near vacation of a trip to South America. These things are nice and worthwhile, but alone they do not amount to a whole lot of verve. Yet verve need not come by anything that is as grand as vacationing in South America. You may get verve simply by reading many books (my kid has now read nearly 2000), by writing essays, by debate, by helping others – for the right reasons. All of this feeds the mind a very healthy diet of thought systems and ideas. It is soul food for the mind. Should you get a guy who has been feeding his mind this stuff all of his young life, and he is gonna draw people to himself like bees to honey. It HAS to happen and he has no choice but to do it.

So, when I read of some kid with a “low” score (pshaw! You hit anywhere near 2100 and you are up there high enough that it just does not matter) getting into a school over a kid with a 2400 I don’t even blink. The 2100 kid probably is just overflowing with verve such that it was obvious she deserved to get in. Verve is vital, even more so than a skyhigh SAT/GPA. Dubya is not the biggest egg in the basket, if you know what I’m saying. I don’t think anyone would dispute this. But the guy obviously has enough verve to command the vote of more than half of voting Americans. With verve, and little else, you can rule nations, as Hitler proved. With a high SAT score only, you may hardly rule a neighborhood council. The top schools are the top schools because they have been selecting for verve for their entire existence, even despite their reliance on the Old Boy’s Network. Were I a student looking to enter the schools, I would be feeding my mind with all sorts of great stuff, reveling in it and sharing with others. By the time I began applying, I would be so eager to share my ideas that putting together my application would be a joy, not the drudgery so many kids make it out to be.

That’s how I see the thing.

RootBeerCaesar · August 24, 2007, 8:19pm

^^ Thats completely true. NO School wants a kid who hates everyone but is a genius, because they know in the real world that kind of super-genius will fail and probally in the end die unknown. It is the people who go out and seek power/position and do things, and have charisma, that are going to suceed. A little intelligence is required but it is not vital at ALL once you get past a certain competency level.

QuantMech · August 24, 2007, 10:06pm

In reply to JHS: yes, it’s clear that you were not limiting the “top schools” to HYPSM+C, although I couldn’t tell exactly where you were drawing the line, or where the OP was drawing it. Sorry not to be more precise about your statement in my post.

Besides schools in the HYPSM+C group, the student applied and was admitted to 3 other universities, 2 of them in the CC Top Universities list. In that sense, the outcome supports your position.

Still, from the limited data set I have available, I would not draw the conclusion that a “combination of arrogance, poor strategy, and bad luck” causes a top scorer not to be admitted to a top school. This seems to suggest that the locus of the problem is with the student, when that might not be the case at all. (The instance of andison comes to mind, although he did not have a 2400.)

It appears to me that a student can be assured of admission at the very top only if the student’s application has something in it that will make an admissions committee member think, “Whoa! We HAVE to have this student!” In math, I’d think of Alison Miller, or Po-Ru, Po-Shen, and Po-Ling Loh as examples of students with the “Whoa!” factor. Yet, I’m also certain that other students will be admitted at the very top schools, with lower scores and without a true “Whoa!” factor ( . . . sorry, Northstarmom).

As to whether it matters: I believe that a top student can obtain a top-flight undergraduate education at any of the top 50 or so research universities in the country (+ high-quality LAC’s); and a distribution of academic talent among many institutions is good for those institutions. But for a top scorer, I think it’s better if the choice of institution is up to the student.

marite · August 24, 2007, 10:32pm

The question: “How do top scorers fail to gain admission at top schools?”
is a very different one from "can a student without a “Whoa!” factor gain admission to top schools. The answer to the second question is obvious. Only 15% or so of students admitted to H have a “Whoa!” factor. So the other 85% have somewhat less stellar credentials.

The first question, which is the topic of this thread, hinges largely on definition of “top scorers” and also on whether only admission to one’s top choice is to be considered success. In the case described by QuantMech, I submit that the top scorer in question met with success since he was admitted to 2 CC top universities as well as another. Jian Li, a perfect SAT scorer who is upset at not being admitted to P or H and M), got into Y, after all; another case of success.

I’m pretty sure that for some superstars (not merely top scorers), the decision hinged to a large extent on financial considerations. It was not entirely up to the student.

epiphany · August 24, 2007, 11:54pm

“This seems to suggest that the locus of the problem is with the student, when that might not be the case at all. (The instance of andison comes to mind, although he did not have a 2400.)”

No. Not necessarily. It also suggests that the locus of the problem could be with the application, not with the “student.” Two different things. The committees are technically not looking at the student, but the representation of, and communication, from the student. Some of that can be perceived more directly via an interview, but most of the information being examined will be what is represented by the student and by those who know him.

To argue with myself for a moment, many students have fine applications, communicating well, but do not appear distinctive enough and/or different enough from others. Either they do not differ enough from the rest of the pool to be “noticed,” or they do differ, but have failed to communicate that in the application – not understanding how important it can be to acceptance.

The very introduction of andison in post 612 supports this. Same candidate, the following year. It wasn’t just that his gap year made him look markedly different: rather his strategy (diverse list) and his attention to the applications were completely different the second time around. Far different results in Year 2 than in Year 1, although some of the institutions he applied to were peers of those in Year 1.

mythmom · August 25, 2007, 2:13am

If we posted sections of essays that distinguish students they would differ markedly from stale, cookie essays that show what a student thinks an adcom might want to hear, some moral lesson learned, or something like that.

As an English professor I have seen a fair number of these essays, and few of them are really interesting. Style is usually the culprit, not topic, theme or intent.

People, expecting corruption from everywhere, asked me if I was going to write my kids’ admissions essays. Of course, I said no for two reasons: 1) the obvious ethical transgression this would be and 2) I honestly don’t think I xould do as good a job as they at being them.

After being asked to describe the neighborhood he grew up in my son began, "I grew up in the universe. It’s a pretty big place, but I feel at home here. My section of the Universe is the (can’t remember science, but sentence evolved into the Milky Way.) He ended a long process by walking up the stairs to his room where he looked out the window into the night sky. I would not have thought of this approach – it was uniquely him. He wrote quite a few essays in this vein and was accepted into colleges that many with higher numerical stats were rejected from. He did have other things going for him, too.

My D was more humorous: the opening salvo of her long, common application essay was “I have always been a dork.” She ended by describing her ezperience of joining a community of dorks. I couldn’t have written this either. The verve, as another poster observed, carries the charisma of the authentic voice. (I won’t concede that G. Bush has verve. Sorry there.) Not to take up too much of my reader’s time, my daughter is making good on the completions her application promised. Voice was met by a very appropriate acceptance.

QuantMech · August 25, 2007, 12:27pm

Many points well taken. Please bear with me as I try to write both concisely and accurately, while not using my native language (Equation).

. . . mostly in response to epiphany:

I agree that the “student” is distinct from the “application.” Parts of the application are largely controllable by the student, some can be strongly influenced, some can be affected by judicious choices (e.g., selection of the teachers to ask for recommendations), and some fall into the category of “just hope for the best.” A student who has given the application his/her best in the first three categories might still run into difficulties with the last.

Curmudgeon posted a hypothetical pair of GC letters about a year ago, recommending “little Johnny.” One was written by a GC “in the know” who didn’t like the student and was trying to scuttle his chances, without doing so overtly. The other was written by a GC “out of the loop,” who was doing his best to write favorably about “little Johnny.” The two letters were identical–classic curmudgeon.

JHS’s outlier hypothesis is also a possiblity.

tokenadult · August 25, 2007, 12:37pm

That’s my LOL of the day. I didn’t see that particular example. Yes, that’s classic curmudgeon. His sense of humor makes important points about college admission more vivid.

cloverdale7 · August 25, 2007, 1:05pm

re: writing test, same with my son: he performed poorly despite a 36 on reading act and 34 on English section of the ACT and many writing awards throughout as well as the top prize for writing in our city and 15 credits of straight A’s in humanities college courses he took at the State University, in which one professor said his papers were better than most of the real college students. He is now at a top LAC and still getting As on his papers. Thankfully, the LAC he is at did not count the writing score, instead requesting that he send in graded papers, which he did --the papers he wrote for the college classes he took during high school. His guidance counselor was shocked at his writing score --she looked at the essay and said it was grammatically perfect, well-organized, and overall excellent and of top quality. Despite that --he still got a low score, for whatever reason. We would have requested a regrade but, talking to admissions departments, found they put so little stock in it that we just did not bother. It had no impact at all on his college admissions.

mythmom · August 25, 2007, 1:30pm

To speak to JHS’s last post: I know of two such cases (both young women) with stellar scores, not perfect, 1550 + on old SAT, one Val, one right near the top of her class, both with interesting EC’s, one in impressive orchestra, one having gone the model UN route, who were both rejected at all schools we might consider top 20 or even top 40. One matriculated at BU, and the other at Fordham; both received very sizable merit scholarships (full ride in one case), and both consoled themselves with that – they were not elligible for need based aid.

I don’t think it’s necessarily true that there was some hidden problem with their applications. Perhaps neither were “knock your socks off, must have” but both very well liked, studious, participating young women with excellent stats.

If it’s possible for one school to pass (Harvard accepts but not Columbia, Yale accepts but not Brown – and I have known two cases like that) it’s possible that these young people were just extraordinarily unlucky. The passes accumulated for them, just as the acceptances of a no more attractive candidate might accumulate for someone else.

One of my son’s friends was accepted everywhere (NYU with huge merit money and UPenn), whereas the kids were not impressed with him. He did not take APCALC or APCHEM, sort of gatekeeper courses for their social world of “really smart kids”. Another boy, more talented by everyone’s account, won an Olympiad for his robot, was shut out of all his choices: Villanova, BC, and will be attending Babson. I think these cases are rare, and usually we can find a rationale for adcoms decisions, but I think some kids just get really unlucky and others really lucky.

Drosselmeier · August 25, 2007, 2:01pm

I agree, but students would be well-advised to keep in mind that admissions officers are people too, not robots. When reading two applications of roughly equal stats, which would you tend to lean toward—1. the one with an essay beginning “When I took the SAT and managed with great vigilance to accomplish an unblemished score…” or 2. the one beginning “I have always been a dork.”? In this case, luck favors those who can lay it down like it is.

Nuff said.

How do top scorers on tests fail to gain admission to top schools?

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