Is he aiming too high?

cellardweller
Sat, 10 Jan 2009 15:23:45 +0000

However, one parent, POIH, his daughter was in top 20% and got into MIT and CalTech. So it’s help to be female and applying to engineering schools.



That would have to be a pretty exceptional applicant despite the rank. It’s a myth that MIT and Caltech have a different set of standards for male and female applicants. I interview many students who apply to MIT and the women who are admitted are at least as qualified as the men. They actually often have better transcripts and just as good test scores. It is just a more self-selecting group as very few unqualified female applicants apply to schools such as MIT or Caltech. Once at MIT , women actually have slightly higher GPAs than men on average.

With 93% of admitted MIT students, male and female, within the top 5% of their class and nearly half of the admitted students valedictorians, there is little room for students with less than stellar transcripts, whatever their test scores or other accomplishments. With a median math SAT score of 780, most admitted students have already shown they are smart. MIT doesn’t want to admit students who haven’t demonstrated they can handle the intense workload and a so-so transcript is a definite red flag. MIT routinely rejects USAMO qualifiers and Intel finalists, so math and science awards by themselves are no guarantee of admission, especially if the rest of the package does not fit.