<p>The point I’m trying to make in this discussion is that the applicant must persuade the admissions people that he’s the kind of person they want. As Pizzagirl suggests, if his thing is reading a lot of literary works, he has to think about how he will tell–and show–a story that reveals that he is something special. It’s not that it’s not worthy–it’s just that it may be harder to show than the achievements of a person with a science award, or a musician who was on From the Top, or a recruitable athlete.</p>
<p>Haha, and I’m baffled that scholarship, assuming it can be conveyed on an application, isn’t highly valued. We’re talking about entry to a place of higher learning after all. I am not suggesting that there aren’t other skills that are valuable or compelling, it’s just funny to me to think that these are considered more compelling. I guess I do think it is a value judgment. My growing sense is that colleges run on a business model that see overinvestment in study as the equivalent of wasted resources that could be better used elsewhere.</p>
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<p>There must be a parallel world somewhere…</p>
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<p>And they get quite close to admitting every UC applicant at one of the UC campus. Well, not all of them … just about 3 out of every four applicants. The rest can try again through the massive transfer from junior college. </p>
<p>Might explain why Cal does not find much problem in admitting a student with a 410 SAT Math score. The UC is a massively overrated system.</p>
<p>SAT scores are massively overrated.</p>
<p>It’s basically a test that measures how fast people can answer stupid questions. </p>
<p>Smart, creative people who tend to think in novel ways often tend to do poorly in that context.</p>
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<p>The college is not giving out an award for intellectual achievement. They are building a community, and they want to know: “what will applicant X do for us? what does he or she bring to the table? What does applicant X bring that others do not?”</p>
<p>It is NOT that they devalue “scholarship” – it is that almost everyone they are admitting is extremely smart and demonstrates scholarship in one area or another. </p>
<p>So the college can have a bunch of scholars and no orchestra or athletic teams – or they can admit scholar-musicians and scholar-athletes and create the environment they strive for. </p>
<p>It is also a world in which scholarship is measured by productivity. A Ph.D. who does not publish and/or attract research dollars will not get tenure.</p>
<p>So the question isn’t whether scholarship is valued – it is whether the applicant can demonstrate that their scholarship, by itself, is remarkable enough to justify turning away other students.</p>
<p>My impression is that top colleges are also looking for students who will go out into the world and do something with all of the knowledge they have absorbed. They want to see a preview of that ability, if it exists, in the applicant.</p>
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<p>That may have been the case 30-some years ago when students took the SAT or ACT going in blind, not knowing what to expect and how to properly interpret the questions.</p>
<p>Today, pretty much every student has had enough exposure to multiple standardized tests beginning in what? 3rd grade? to have figured out the “system” and the expected answers. Yes, the smart creative types need to apply an additional filter before they answer a given question: not “what is the best answer?” but “what is the best answer if that problem and its answer was written by an average, uncreative thinker?” This skill is easily figured out though trial and error by the time most kids turn 10.</p>
<p>“if his thing is reading a lot of literary works, he has to think about how he will tell–and show–a story that reveals that he is something special.”</p>
<p>Right. Reading books, like listening to music, is not an academic endeavor. It’s a hobby. The academic pursuit is analyzing the books, coming up with original ideas about them, and explaining those ideas, usually in some kind of historical or comparative context. If your admissions pitch is that you are a devoted scholar, BE a scholar, not a fan. Looking at plants isn’t botany, using Internet Explorer isn’t computer science, and reading books isn’t achievement in English literature. Those are just the necessary first steps in those pursuits.</p>
<p>A high school kid with Intel-level achievement in the humanities – like getting a paper on Dostoyevsky accepted in an academic journal – would leap to the front of the admissions line just like the Intel kids (and EC superstars) do.</p>
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<p>It’s basically a test that measures how fast people can answer stupid questions. </p>
<p>Smart, creative people who tend to think in novel ways often tend to do poorly in that context.<<<</p>
<p>Twist it all you want, but few SMART people would score at an abysmal 410 level. One gets that score by only answering the easy questions. The questions might be basic, but it is rather silly to call them stupid. And, fwiw, smart and creative apply to different types of aptitude, including the ability to answer stupid math questions in a novel manner. The SAT happens to reward such students. </p>
<p>That 410 SAT score spoke volumes about Cal’s admissions and the corresponding math curriculum in California’s high schools.</p>
<p>LoremIpsum – if you think that all students do a lot of prep for the SAT, you are living in a bubble. There is very little incentive for California kids in public schools to prep for the SAT, and not much attention focused on it. My son took PSAT and SAT cold. He liked his first score so he stopped. If that immigrant, ESL girl with the 410 in math had the qualifying numbers from her GPA she would have had little incentive to prep for a test. </p>
<p>I realize that there is a mad mad world on CC where people think that a score of 700 is low. But it’s not the California world, at least not among moderate income students at public high schools. </p>
<p>And even the Ivies are going to evaluate the scores in the context of where they came from. They have regional reps who know the schools, and they know what the average test scores are for a given school from the school profile submitted by the GC. </p>
<p>There are lot of people in this world who have better things to do with their time than to study for a standardized test. A strong college app will generally make it clear what those better things have been.</p>
<p>Xiggi, how well would you do on timed math test where all the questions were written in Spanish?</p>
<p>"SAT scores are massively overrated.</p>
<p>It’s basically a test that measures how fast people can answer stupid questions. </p>
<p>Smart, creative people who tend to think in novel ways often tend to do poorly in that context. "</p>
<p>Sounds like great excuse for people who need to justify abysmally low scores while applying to top colleges.</p>
<p>Calmom, I am afraid you picked the wrong language to make your point, or the wrong guy. I would score exactly the same on the math section in the three languages spoken at my home.</p>
<p>Let me point out, that even if I had not been raised in Spanish, your point would still fall flat because this student attended a California school and did well enough to qualify for a UC admission. A student who learned Greek and German. Ask yourself how the reported HS grades relate to the SAT score of 410. A member of academic clubs? MESA-Math Engineering Science Art 9th-12th grades
vice-president '97-'98
Academic Decathlon 9th-12th</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/who/1.html[/url]”>http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/who/1.html</a></p>
<p>Given that the kid was on an advanced math track, had A’s in Honors Algebra II/Trig and Math Analysis (the pre-calc course), I’d say that the SAT score doesn’t reflect the student’s true abilities. Maybe its just an anomaly – for example, maybe the kid accidentally filled in the wrong set of bubbles on a math section; or maybe its the timed test condition. I never quite got the equating of speed with ability – if I wanted to truly test someone’s math ability, I’d give them a set of problems to solve on their own, letting them take whatever time they needed, and asked them to write out the steps they followed to get the result. That would tell me if they understood the math and how they arrived at the result.</p>
<p>There’s a very high likelihood that the high school math teachers used that approach to testing, given that is the way that my son’s very excellent high school math teachers assessed work. (To the frustration of my son, who didn’t like the part about writing out steps in between the question and the answer).</p>
<p>I’d never use a single kid’s SAT scores to validate or invalidate the quality of the curriculum at a school. That would be a gross misuse and misapplication of the SAT, which is not even tied to the curriculum. </p>
<p>(If that kid’s school had participated in the Golden State Exams, you’d have a somewhat better measure, as those tests were closely tied to the curriculum and would have required students to solve problems on their own. But as I’ve already noted, it was a voluntary testing scheme and many schools did not participate)</p>
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<p>You simply confirmed how woefully ignorant you are about the construct, scope, and use of the SAT, and standardized tests in general. Time, or speed as you called it, is THE controlling element of the math SAT REASONING test. Without time limit, the test would be trivial. </p>
<p>But this technical element does not change anything to the argument about the difference between the HS grading and the SAT result. This student was simply not well-prepared for a college level math. This is not about a student scoring just below 800. It is about scoring at the bottom of college applicants, and at a level that is even low for the UC standards. </p>
<p>The HS curriculum must have been abysmal and only advanced on paper. Bringing an apple to school for a glorious A! </p>
<p>Not sure why this is so hard to understand.</p>
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<p>Which is exactly why the test is totally invalid as a test of actual ability. </p>
<p>It’s testing mental processing speed, which has nothing whatsoever to do with intellect or ability. </p>
<p>If you knew anything about IQ testing (particularly the WISC), you would know that.</p>
<p>I did not mention IQ, WISC, or Wechsler in this thread as it is utterly irrelevant. I discussed SAT, HS grades, and their relation to Cal’s admission.</p>
<p>And like it or not, the SAT is what has been and still is widely used to evaluate college applicants. And not a Mensa membership.</p>
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<p>Perhaps you misunderstood what I said: even students who don’t prep for the SAT have had nearly a decade of exposure to standardized tests. A smart, creative type kid will learn to deduce what is expected as a right answer long before he or she gets around to taking the official SAT. </p>
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<p>One doesn’t necessarily need to prep for these tests to do well. I convinced my younger son to humor me before his first ACT and spend 6 hours taking two practice tests. He got a 36.0. He later took the PSAT (240) and re-took the ACT as a school graduation requirement (36.0), both with zero prep and not even a calculator. My other son did zero prep for his ACT and only got a 35, but he took it at age 13 (as a high school junior). Both sons are very much creative unconventional thinkers, the ones you feel do poorly on these tests.</p>
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<p>Wow, then both my kids would have gotten the right answers and still flunked your test. Both of them regularly invented their own solutions on-the-fly and often made intuitive leaps explained by “well it was just obvious.”</p>
<p>I can’t believe a kid who was really good at math, and scored 410 as a result of an anomaly, wouldn’t take the test again. Maybe the kid just freezes during standardized math tests. What that presages for college is debatable.</p>