<p>calmom,</p>
<p>That is exactly where you will find it. Do you disagree?</p>
<p>Another way to capture the idea of “qualified” is to imagine a meeting of the three dozen members of the Harvard admissions committee. Strong candidates will receive unanimous support, other candidates will get a mixture of ADMIT and DENY votes. In this hypothetical (or maybe not so hypothetical) situation, some candidates will be admitted as a very mixed decision, and it is fair to say that these are less “qualified” than others.
For the same reason, some of the rejected candidates are arguably “qualified”.</p>
<p>If the actual admissions works in a similar way, I do think that there is a strong relation between the informal lay public understanding of “qualified” and the degree of unanimity in admitting (or the lack of unanimity in rejecting) a given applicant. </p>
<p>I also think that, however the admissions works, most rejected candidates are not on the wrong side of a hairline decision; their cases are easy and predictable negative decisions. That is the very opposite of the picture suggested by admissions office claims of 80 or 90 percent being qualified. (“We regret to inform you that due to the large number of qualified applicants…”)</p>
<p>The statement: “That there is a 40-50% chance of somthing happening” is capable of being proven true or false. With careful definition the statement that “I love you” is capable of being proven true or false. The statement “God exists” is not. That is why it is a matter of faith not science.</p>
<p>I’m not talking about the practical problems of creating and experiment. I’m talking about things that are conceptually incapable of being proven true or false like the proposition: “God exists”</p>
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<p>This gets back to the issue of criteria. By what gauge can one say that X is or isn’t in the “top 90%” of applicants? SAT scores? GPAs? Academic ECs? Artistic achievements? </p>
<p>Let’s assume that a college decided to pass up on a student who, in terms of SAT scores and GPAs was in the top 90% in favor of a student who might not be but was an accomplished cellist or had demonstrated his or her economic acumen by having launched a million dollar business while in high school (so, skip economics 101 and give lectures at the B school, eh?). Would the college have made the wrong decision? Are all GPAs the same? Is an A in AP-Calc taken in 10th grade the same as an A in Algebra II? Are GPAS from different schools the same? </p>
<p>Colleges are aware of these issues. Yes, they give a tip or even a hook (depends on the college, depends on whether the hooked applicant is ED or RD); they give tips for geographical diversity (among my S’s friends two foreign countries and 9 different states seem to be represented); they give preference to tuba players over pianists; and so on and so forth. Their needs are not the same every year and their decisions will thus not be the same from year to year.</p>
<p>So I think Harvard is honest when it says “there is no formula.” It is one that is repeated on other college websites.</p>
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<p>JHS, thanks for hitting the nail on the head.</p>
<p>I’d almost be willing to concede curious’s other point about rhetoric: selective colleges tend to use the more generous term “qualified” rather than “admissible.” But notions of admissible/qualified are not capricious; they’re informed by institutional values that run deeper than maximizing first-year gpa, and by years of data on how students with diverse profiles have performed, academically and otherwise.</p>
<p>And adcoms are good at it. Grade inflation notwithstanding, 91% of Harvard students graduated with Latin Honors before a policy change a few years ago. So the “able to graduate definition”–with its not-so-veiled implication that there are scores of barely “qualified” students at elite colleges, the benificiaries of unjustifiable preferential treatment, barely muddling through to graduation after having deprived more worthy applicants–seems wide of the mark.</p>
<p>I’ll go back to the description Jim Nondorf gave at Yale a few years ago. Approximately: </p>
<p>We have 20,000 applications. 15,000 of them are fully qualified to do the work here. [I think that is approximately the graduation standard.] On the basis of our experience, I think we can identify about 5,000 of those who are super-qualified, who really could get the most out of this or any other top university, and who offer something special. [That is what I mean by “qualified”.] After that, we lose all confidence in our ability to make distinctions, but we have to do it anyway. Until we build more residential colleges, we can’t offer admission to more than 35% or so of that group.</p>
<p>That seems about right to me, in terms of proportions. Probably 75% of the applicants are capable of doing the work, and 25% are serious candidates for admission, and 10% or less get accepted. And all of the admittees – including legacies, URMs, athletes, developments, oboists – come from the last group. Why wouldn’t they? In some cases, athletic or artistic skill, or wealth, may be enough to get someone from the 75% group to the 25% group and beyond, but it would have to be really fabulous skill or wealth (or at least luck – like being one of the only oboists in the 75% group a year they need to land an oboist). Mere legacy or URM status doesn’t do it – I’m sure there are plenty of both in the 25% group. Maybe (probably) it makes a difference at that point, although plenty of impressive kids of both types still get rejected (or waitlisted – same thing).</p>
<p>I’m sure the collective process works the way it does in other contexts. Some decisions achieve consensus relatively quickly – these being the really “more qualified” or the marginal among the most qualified – and some are tough, and take a lot of hashing out, and maybe reasonable people could disagree about the choices. But the tough choices are probably grouped pretty tightly, so it really doesn’t matter that much. </p>
<p>That does NOT mean their SATs or GPAs are grouped tightly, though. Since the criteria are varied and substitutable for each other, at that point I would expect a wide range of SATs or GPAs. My guess is that they also watch things like URM status, legacies, oboists, classics students, likely premeds, etc., to make certain they don’t wind up below an optimal range (or in some cases above it). (Some schools clearly don’t do that, but I’m sure others do.) Those qualities may have a big impact on what happens with the last, hard set of decisions – the last 100 places or so.</p>
<p>Curious14 - Look, every single person that Harvard admits is by definition qualified, because, limited only by civil rights laws that may apply, Harvard is the <em>sole</em> judge of who is or isn’t qualified. Nobody else gets to say. The very act of admitting a given candidate, no matter what their stats are, automatically endows him/her with the property of “qualified-ness.”</p>
<p>Your or my or anyone else’s opinion about who is or isn’t qualified is merely so much hot air. These other opinions are completely irrelevant.</p>
<p>Hear, hear to post #208. Post #207 is really good too. Both posters are up to their usual high standards in this thread.</p>
<p>“And adcoms are good at it. Grade inflation notwithstanding, 91% of Harvard students graduated with Latin Honors before a policy change a few years ago.”</p>
<p>MarathonMan: Please provide the link to the source for this information.</p>
<p>The Harvard Latin–Honors story was originally in the Boston Globe, I’m pretty sure, and was widely reported elsewhere:</p>
<p><a href=“http://graphics.boston.com/globe/metro/packages/harvard_honors/[/url]”>http://graphics.boston.com/globe/metro/packages/harvard_honors/</a></p>
<p>Here is a link to stats regarding honors for the class of 2007:</p>
<p>For a graduating class of 1694, 782 received no honor. </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/06.07/20-degreechart.html[/url]”>http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/06.07/20-degreechart.html</a></p>
<p>Stephen Greenblatt, who is quoted in the Globe article as considering his Harvard students “brilliant” was hired away from Berkeley.</p>
<p>This is a great exaple of what I mean by a meaningless definition of “qualified”, thank you Courier:</p>
<p>"Look, every single person that Harvard admits is by definition qualified, because, limited only by civil rights laws that may apply, Harvard is the <em>sole</em> judge of who is or isn’t qualified. Nobody else gets to say. The very act of admitting a given candidate, no matter what their stats are, automatically endows him/her with the property of “qualified-ness.”</p>
<p>Your or my or anyone else’s opinion about who is or isn’t qualified is merely so much hot air. These other opinions are completely irrelevant."</p>
<p>OK your source is the Boston Globe. From the Harvard “Handbook for Students” - “The total number of degrees summa cum laude, magna cum laude and cum laude in a field sum to 50%.”</p>
<p>As an undergrad at UNC-CH, I had a dorm mate who handed in a paper she had done in a summer class/prior UG class of some kind (??? I didn’t know her until I was a junior) at Harvard. She had received an A on the paper at Harvard and was INCENSED when she got the same paper back with a C on it at UNC. (“How DARE they? Who do they think they are?”)</p>
<p>Just a little story, but we all though it was pretty hilarious at the time (“cheaters never prosper” and all that…).</p>
<p>DocT, in 2001 the number of honors degrees was actually around 91%. Harvard nearly halved that percentage by dint of raising the GPA necessary to receive honors, but did not tackle the issue of grade inflation itself. It tried, but without much success. Efforts in that direction may have been derailed by the Summers controversy. It will be interesting to see if the question is raised again, but I doubt it will be soon, as the faculty is grappling with the Gen Ed review, the change to the calendar, the Allston expansion, and many other issues.</p>
<p><a href=“calmom:”>quote</a>
My daughter is a case in point – her math SAT was 580. CR was 620. Writing, well above 700. She focused on her interest in studying Russian & her Russian foreign exchange experience in her apps. She was within the top 4% of students in her high school class.
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<p>So the SAT was reasonably predictive in her case, even more so when combined with high school grade and rank data, and especially when controlled for course selection? She would avoid math courses with good reason (you said so, confirming the SAT score), is strong in writing (again confirming the SAT score), and is motivated to make good grades (high GPA). Your kid sounds more like a case for the SAT and for numbers-based admission, than an example against it.</p>
<p>I had the same reaction as Siserune about the reported scores of Calmom’s D and Mollie’s fiance. In Calmom’s D case, the low math SAT scored denoted a low math ability, which should be no handicap for someone going into the humanities with a strong bent towards foreign languages. In the case of Mollie’s fiance, a low SAT-verbal score was not a handicap for someone going into the sciences.The scores that counted were those relevant to their future disciplines. Adcoms are able to see that.</p>
<p>Re Post 217 (and 218):
I didn’t think that calmom’s point was that her daughter’s scores were not parallel with interests & abilities. Although the OP has consistently refused himself to define “qualified” and “unqualified” (& although he brought it up), I thought the subtext of the hand-wringing was about some <em>generalized</em>, universalized standard which somehow is indicative of the proper membership card at all elite U’s. (And I thought her point was that although her d’s scores were not in some predetermined stratosphere, both her d’s admissions results and her college performance to date, work against such assumptions.)</p>
<p>(Pardon me if I misinterpret, calmom)</p>
<p>But Siserune, I posted that in response to commentary about whether kids with scores in the 500’s could do well - not on admission standards. It is highly unlikely that my daughter would have been admitted to Columbia with those scores. However, she did not apply to Columbia; she applied to Barnard, which has a more holistic admissions process. Due to the Barnard/Columbia association, my d. end up taking about half her coursework at Columbia, where she happened to earn all A’s.</p>
<p>I’d note that Marite’s comment is illustrative – she mistakenly characterizes an above-average score as “low” [580 is 68th percentile for all takers in 2006, 74th percentile for females]. So the point is that many people would see a student like my d with a strong aptitude for language and above-average math ability as somehow being “unqualified” for Ivy league study. I see what you are saying about the scores actually reflecting aptitudes – but the fact is that both the Math & CR scores were well below the 25th percentile for either Columbia or Barnard. Under purely numbers-based admission, she clearly would not have been accepted, though her experience demonstrates that she is very capable of doing the work.</p>
<p>And Epiphany, I think you’ve done a good job of expressing the point of my post - probably with more clarity than I’ve done.</p>