<p>What does a proctologist and a HYP applicant have in common? They’re both looking at crap shoots.</p>
<p>Actually, I didn’t see it as a “URM” thing, except to the extent that may have been a factor considered in disregarding low test scores. I saw a big boost for leadership and active involvement in their local communities. Only one of the four kids failed to win entry. </p>
<p>And no, I don’t think that kid whose greatest achievement was getting his driver’s License would have fared much better with a different essay – unless he could have come up with something that showed a different side of him. He was a B student whose application projected a sense of an ordinary kid with a limited worldview and modest aspirations.(Main reason he wants to attend college: “to become an independent adult”.) </p>
<p>One thing we didn’t see was SAT II scores – and that was definitely required by the UC’s at the time of the Frontline article (1999). That’s a very significant omission, because the UC academic index would have added all those scores together, combining them with GPA to calculate a numerical scores. So the real ad coms would have been looking at that figure, not individual test scores. That provides a lot of flexibility. The student with the 410 math score was trilingual, had roughly a 4.0 GPA, and might very well have had stronger SAT II scores. (She was a native Spanish speaker who studied German in high school, but she could have easily have opted to take the Spanish SAT II as a way to boost scores. Given that UC policy was for students to rely on the best 3 available SAT II score, I certainly would have advised that. )</p>
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<p>When your high school kid decides to apply for a job at the mall, do you advise him to just go as he is, or do you advise him to dress well, make sure he has a resume on hand, know how to shake hands, be well-groomed, look people in the eye, and so forth?</p>
<p>There are many types of intelligence, and the ability to present oneself well (or maybe it’s conduct oneself well) in any type of “interview” situation (whether it’s for college, a summer job, meeting the girlfriend’s parents) is a form of intelligence. Please note that I’m not saying suck-up or misrepresent. I’m saying investigating what the “interviewer” is looking for, and presenting one’s overall package in a way that is both true to who you are but also hits the hot buttons of what they’re looking for. </p>
<p>I don’t know why you think students who don’t show this kind of initiative and who just bubble in “here’s my GPA” and think they are done with the whole thing should still be granted entry into elite colleges.</p>
<p>As much as I hope to disagree, the letter writer is accurate. The current system of admission places too much emphasis on soft factors that are relatively easy to manipulate.</p>
<p>If they were so easy to “manipulate” we wouldn’t be having this discussion ad nauseum, would we? :)</p>
<p>Actually, the writer’s sour grapes suggest that the manipulation is not easy to pull off and does not fool the adcoms all that often. </p>
<p>Not surprising that a bubblehead would --as usual-- reach an erroneous conclusion.</p>
<p>From the view of someone her age and from what I assume is a younger perspective of those in this thread, I think this has blown way out of proportion. I agree that she may have been out of line in some statements but when frustrated and believing you were “jipped” out of something you deserve you say things you don’t mean. It’s like when you’re in an argument with a friend and after you don’t think they’re listening, you mutter some insults under your breath. With her resume I’d think she would of been accepted and her not being accepted has probably given a wake up call to some kids. Some of the things he says are right though. Why gain your acceptance through things you are not in control of? These things should only come into factors in the last stage if not at all. For instance, I’m Asian and genetics doomed me to be short. Is this my fault, no.
… But there is still a tall scholarship and of course the left handed scholarship. Anyways, I got sidetracked. This has been blown out of proportion and let’s all just look at it from this point of view. She has helped those who have watched her interview or read her satire piece that you need to stand out to be assured an acceptance letter, whether it is fair or not.</p>
<p>“that is, part of the expectation on an elite level is that students take initiative, ask questions, seek out answers without prompting from others.”</p>
<p>Right. And you don’t need a book – all the elite schools have elaborate admissions web sites explaining what they are looking for. Yale’s information about how to write an effective essay is particularly direct and useful. Now, a lot of 17-year-olds have trouble applying that information to maximum effect, which is why my business is a going concern. But that doesn’t mean that without coaching, a student who is Ivy League material would just think admission is a matter of getting A’s and then filling out a form. Students today, including working-class ones, know how to read web sites. If it doesn’t occur to you to read Harvard’s web site before applying, you are not ready for Harvard.</p>
<p>Now, are there some kids who aren’t ready for Harvard solely due to the faults of the adults around them, and whose talent would have grown into something much greater in a better environment? Absolutely, but not much of that problem can be fixed at the Ivy admission stage. (The public school admission stage is, or ought to be, a different story.) The system is a long way from perfect, but it works pretty well at filling the schools with kids who serve the schools’ aims.</p>
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<p>If they’re so “easy to manipulate,” then why are there so many disappointed kids on CC every year? Couldn’t they all just manipulate their way in to their schools of choice?</p>
<p>Some are better at manipulating than others 
Seriously, I think the disappointment stems from the misguided notions that there is a strict meritocracy and that there are only a handful of schools worthy of consideration.</p>
<p>I was dismayed by the AO’s comments posted by GMTplus7. Especially this:</p>
<p>“His test scores tell me that he’s got a lot of raw brain power. He went to a very competitive high school, but it doesn’t seem that he did much after school so that he had a lot of time to study.”</p>
<p>I see this disdain again and again. There’s this idea that devotion to study is a bad thing, that it diminishes a student. It seems to me that there are plenty of students who come home and head to the computer for play. That time theoretically available for study isn’t used all that fruitfully so when it is used well, I’d think it should be appreciated, not disregarded. The kid who spends free time reading, studying, etc. might be a valuable addition to Berkeley.</p>
<p>The student who is spread thin with lists of activities is regarded as the far superior student…even though in my own experience, these kids are the ones most likely to slough off their responsibilities onto others. If I were interviewing, the first thing I’d do is to pin down the too-good-to-be-true applicant on how all these activities are actually accomplished. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the added dimension of extra activities. I also appreciate the ability to juggle the demands of school and ECs. I don’t appreciate that the worker bees end up propping up these kids who can’t finish group work due to conflicting demands or who can’t proof galleys because there’s an exam that gets in the way or who leave a yearbook obligation unfinished because ED results have come out.</p>
<p>3girls,
There really are students who can manage top grades and high-level ECs. They are generally the ones who get into the tippy top colleges.</p>
<p>That wasn’t my point. I know there are kids who manage ECs and academics well though it’s not such a neat correlation between those kids and tippy top schools. Plenty of kids who rely on others to keep their activities and academics in order end up at tippy top schools and plenty who don’t, do not. At least that’s what I’ve witnessed over the past 6 years. </p>
<p>My point is that the kid who essentially creates an EC of extra study is not particularly valued. My secondary point is that while I think that the kids who take on ECs at a high level deserve a great deal of admiration, I don’t respect those who achieve it by dumping on their peers. That’s all.</p>
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<p>Or, better stated, from a misguided notion of what strict meritocracy really means. While is a term that is widely used, many might be surprised by how different their interpretation is from what Michael Young suggested. </p>
<p>The biggest discrepancy comes from pretending meritocracy can be measured by a number of standardized yardstick all the while not controlling for factors such as SES, or --shudder-- race or even religion. </p>
<p>All in all, strict meritocracy is a loudly quacking canard. All we have is an imperfect and subjective RELATIVE meritocracy. And, that is both what is still very much needed, and fortunately widely applied by our most selective schools. </p>
<p>And that is why the “system” worked as intended for this … OP. She got exactly what she could have expected, had she had the better understood her own limitations and lacking qualifications. But, we know, from her “satire” that it is easier to rely on excuses and a sorry attitude than to look at her world objectively.</p>
<p>@3girls. The rules of the game are that u cannot use your EC block to do more studying. But u get a waiver only if the extra studying results in u becoming a Westinghouse Science Finalist.</p>
<p>3girls3cats-
I think the thinking is that not only will a kid who’s involved in ECs have something extra to offer the school besides academics, but that the kid who’s playing on the football team or working 20 hours a week and still getting A’s has a reserve to call on in college if need be, while the kid who needs to spend all their free time studying to get those same A’s might not be as academically successful.</p>
<p>What good is being brilliant if you don’t do anything productive with it?</p>
<p>I think that the comparison between the student who is “playing on the football team or working 20 hours a week and still getting A’s” and the student who “needs to spend all their free time studying to get those same A’s” leaves out a category of student: that is, the student who spends a lot of time studying because he/she is going much deeper into the material than is necessary to “get A’s.” High school grading systems are not set up to recognize differences among A students. </p>
<p>I think that deeper learning is productive in itself. A student might participate in the Intel or Siemens competition, rather than going deeper into subjects studied in high school, but there is a long way between high school course content and the frontiers of knowledge in most subjects. I respect a student for covering part of that ground. The students who participate in Intel or Siemens often have research mentors who can pull them up to the frontier in a very narrow band. (I recognize that there are exceptions, but many of the winners, even, are in this category.)</p>
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If there are such students, they need to do something to demonstrate that they are doing this if they would like colleges to pay attention to it.</p>
<p>I think it’s the case that the sorts of students who end up at the most selective schools did not need to spend a great deal of time studying in high school in order to get As. For this reason, they are also able to achieve other things. If this is deeper study, I think that would be respected. But the college isn’t going to take your word for it.</p>
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<p>Deeper learning should indeed be productive. And, for most, it should also be rewarding, be it in high school, or later in tertiary education.</p>
<p>However, if there is one area that “applies” to the claim of admissions’ manipulation, you just have placed your thumb on it! If there is one poster child for a competition that does yield rewards, it does take the form of an Intel. And, unfortunately, as the numerous stories about the LI train and the paint-by-the-numbers at Stonybrook show, it could also be a poster child for manipulation by … insiders. For every Evan O’Dorney, there are hundreds of recipients who only got there through well-connected adult participation. </p>
<p>I have repeatedly written that if the Intel delayed (as it should) its announcements until May, the number of projects would sink like a rock, as the main and overwhelming reason of the participation is to game the admission decisions through a well-oiled machine of insiders. </p>
<p>By delaying the announcements, it would be clear that an interest in deeper learning was the sole motivation of the participation. As it plays out today, the opposite is painfully clear.</p>
<p>But heck, when one mentions manipulation, the idea that fabricated meritocracy exists does not come to mind. ;(</p>
<p>I do sometimes suspect that high school ECs are used by adcoms as a test for how well students will actually do in college while being distracted by parties, dating, campus organizations and doing things like laundry for themselves. If you can only manage an A average in high school by studying all the time, you are likely to be overwhelmed in an elite college.</p>
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<p>That’s not entirely true. My son taught himself 4 AP subjects over 4 successive weekends (weekdays were loaded with class assignments) and took 8 AP tests his sophomore year. He received 3 personalized acceptance letters which noted that this was a factor which impressed the adcoms.</p>