Even if you interpret it that way (I didn’t), the fact that highly paid college consultants seem to be able to influence decisions in these admissions offices suggests that all is not well.
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It isnt an extracurricular if it is your choice of academic major. So yes, music majors would usually audition for terriary education and have some type of performance based activity as part of their experience on their application.
If one is applying for physics, the applicant’s musical prowess is not relevant in any way. If while one is studying physics, one decides to join the orchestra or crew club, that is fine.
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They don’t. But they don’t give admissions preferences to students because they are good at lacrosse or because they need an oboist. While I support holistic admissions, I don’t think students who come from schools where academics are the sole criteria for admissions are less interesting. Certainly, the plethora of talented individuals that have graduated from Oxford would suggest otherwise.
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It’s not directly comparable to scores today. First, the SAT has been reset a couple of times, making higher scores much easier than back in the day. Second, superscoring was not a thing back then.
Not disagreeing with your central point that admissions are more difficult today, but the SAT score doesn’t tell the entire story.
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This is very much consistent with my experience.
One thing that I liked about attending MIT was that I met a lot of people who in terms of academic merit were just like me, but in terms of where they came from and what their background was were very different. It was cool for example at the welcome reception for international students to meet people from all around the world who looked very different from each other and from me, but when you talk to them you discover that they are in some ways (such as academic merit) very similar to each other and very similar to me. I met people from all over the world who in the ways that I cared about were much more similar to me compared to most of the people I knew in high school, even if they were very different in ways that some politicians might care about. One example is that I met a princess from Thailand who in high school had raced the same type of sailboat that I had raced. We had grown up on opposite sides of the world, looked totally different, and had both learned the same mathematics and raced the same boats.
As another example I remember sharing a rental at Stanford with another graduate student who taught me how to make Mexican food. It never occurred to me that he was “Hispanic”, nor did I even know what that was. I just knew that he was a pleasant and very smart guy who was like me a graduate student and who could cook a type of food that I had not previously been exposed to, but that I liked to eat (and I still cook).
Academic merit does not yield clones.
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We are in the extraordinary situation in some states where an applicant’s math prowess on an actual standardized math test can not be considered in their application to be a math major, but their presidency of the drama club can be.
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Good grief, god forbid your kids have to mingle with kids who aren’t on the same intellectual level as them.
This is NOT real life.
Or shouldn’t be.
Have I fallen off the societal train somewhere; did I miss a stop? We have friends who sell trinkets on Etsy, who work at the local supermarket. They’re not all white-collar professionals at the top of their game.
What are y’all really saying here?
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It’s not that these foreign universities only offer academics and more academics. They have sports and other clubs and activities their students can participate in. Some students are very good soccer players, some are talented musicians or artists, some were student leaders in their high school, etc. But the difference is, none of those talents factored into their university’s admission decision.
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Harvard professor Steven Pinker just wrote an op-ed in the Crimson that admissions should be more meritocratic. He also specifically addresses the “academic drones” trope.
Others argue that holistic admissions are necessary to avoid a class of grinds and drudges. … In any case, the stereotype is false. The psychologists Camilla P. Benbow and David Lubinski have found that precocious adolescents with sky-high SAT scores grew up to excel not only in academia, medicine, business, and technology, but also in literature, drama, art, and music.
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Of course they will “mingle with kids who aren’t on the same intellectual level as them.” But if they are working on discovering the cure for cancer, I would like them to be surrounded by a substantial cohort of similarly smart, motivated kids and they can inspire each other. Same if they are working on discovering a new planet, or whatever. Highly intelligent kids can get very motivated being around other highly intelligent kids, and the results can be amazing. We don’t always need to cater to the average in everything.
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Because of course Adcom’s are too dumb to look at a transcript and see a kid who is two levels about the rest of the HS in math, a string of A’s in tough math courses, participation in AIME or Physics Olympiad, etc. and understand that the kid is good in math without an SAT score.
SAT’s don’t do much at the tail end… they confirm, but aren’t in and of themselves evidence of superior math talent. There are many other opportunities (including the dreaded and maligned EC’s that you guys abhor) for a prospective math major to show their math prowess.
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Good point. Post edited to focus on 1970 rejectivity rates rather than SAT scores.
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That is technically correct but also very misleading. Years ago those scores were 90th percentile or higher because the test was different. Today the equivalent scale is 1500+ for those percentiles. The scoring and resultant scaling was completely changed, multiple times, over the years.
EDIT: sorry I now see that hebegebe already commented about this
Except that because of this very same unpredictability, the person you’re referring to may not get into any of the schools higher on their list. And that’s why they apply to this school. If we could change the system in one fell swoop for everyone and every selective school that would be fine, but until then you can only play the game as it currently exists.
I don’t think that citing two schools which both practice holistic admissions is a particularly good indicator of whether or not “academic merit yields clones.” The Chinese Gaokao and similar extreme-stakes, single-test systems would be a far better predictor. I’m sure the kids taking those tests also have their own hobbies and non-academic interests, though I wonder whether or to what degree those interests get more crowded out on the way to college than they do for the students who get to MIT and Stanford.
For my part I’m saying that the experience at a school with a 25/50/75th percentile SAT (per CDS) of 1300/1400/1500 will be different than that at a school with 1000/1100/1200. You may not place value in the former. In fact you may even find it to be a detriment! And that’s fine. I’d ask however that you not be judgmental when observing the values of others.
100% this. My kids regularly cite the super bright student body around them at their current boarding school as the very best thing about the place.
Yup. There’s a reason why Caltech is test blind. The SAT (and ACT) are way too blunt an instrument to measure the level of math proficiency they’re looking for.
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not many participate in AIME or the IMO. Few,actually. CalTech can rely upon that in sorting its applicants, but the UC’s certainly can not. And everyone gets As, so those grades aren’t all that helpful, are they? Some school districts limit how much public school kids can advance (limiting algebra in middle school, for example). So for the solid, excellent math student, no, it would not be easy for UCLA or UC Irvine to determine who that is-should we require the applicants to all take the IMO instead of the SAT? And is that score even allowed to be considered by the UCs? Frankly, why do you prefer the IMO to the SAT anyway, for the average excellent student?
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I think there is some confusion here. I am as anti-holistic admissions, pro-test admissions as anyone.
I don’t want a homogeneous student body at any university. I don’t think a meritocratic system would create a homogenous student body. I have met too many smart people from all over to think that would happen.
I don’t want football or oboe accomplishments to be considered for the admission of engineering or biology majors, but I certainly want fine arts and sports to be part of their college experience.
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It’s more of a challenge in the US where much of the point of a liberal arts education is exploration. Tons of kids change major, often more than once, even when they think they know what they want to study. And of course still others are very much undecided when they enter.
I know that in other places that’s not the case, but here in the US it is. So unless we make 100% of kids decide in a fairly inflexible, mostly unchangeable way what it is they want to study, it’s tough to endorse a system that offers e.g. a biology test for kids who think they want to study biology.
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My children went to a private school that limited the number of AP classes a student could take. It was a K-12 school that started algebra later than the public schools. That is part of the school’s academic profile and the college admissions officers are very aware of this. The school’s college admissions are very good. There are always disappointed kids and some surprises, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.
I’d be all for hard testing and gpa requirements for all STEM majors and an open holistic process for all others. 
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Perhaps a highly selective school could offer course specific entrance exams for those who want them and a general exam for students who aren’t sure of their major.
I don’t know. I am far from being the person to solve this riddle. I just think we can do better than a fallible human admissions officer with a humanities degree, who isn’t legally allowed in some cases to consider standardized math test scores, deciding if they should accept the mechanical engineering applicant who played trumpet or the mechanical engineering applicant who acted in plays.
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There’s sorta kinda a little bit of a version of this when it comes to CS at many schools, mostly large publics where despite their size overall the demand is just too great for the supply of seats. You either apply into and are accepted into the major or you cannot major in CS. So there’s not a separate test but presumably a separate/additional vetting process. And of course the school may accept you but not into the major, so you have to pick something else.
ETA: specific example - one of my droids was accepted to the CoE at U Mich, and is now waiting on their CS decision. So it’s a second, additional review process undertaken after the general acceptance process.
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