<p>I totally agree that the SAT is a joke compared to the Bac. That is why I am mystified by the idea that colleges’ admission standards should be discussed in connection with SAT scores, just because they quantifiable. The only quantifiable indices are board scores and GPAs (and to French eyes, American GPAs are another huge joke).
I get your point about the person being “able to handle the work” but most profs would be pained to consider someone who got Ds as qualifying. But all colleges must have a bottom quartile, whether the average grade for the bottom quartile is a C or a D. </p>
<p>Collegealum: Harvard’s Fitzsimmons has talked of the “happy bottom quartile” I expect that this is where the students whose strengths were not academic could be found; these could be the children of big donors; athletic stars; artistic stars; students who spent most of their time in ECs of all sorts. Should they not be admitted? My brother, who studied at the University of Paris, was quite envious of the American universities campus life. As a member of a student music group (early music), he was particular impressed by the support given to student music groups and their prominent presence on American campuses.</p>
<p>Are you incapable of understanding that the curriculum and admissions procedures are different things? Did you not see collegealums post, in which he explained that it appears that Chicago does pay attention to data in its admission process? Are you unaware that colleges have acess to plenty of hard data in addition to the SAT I’s? You know buy the way that Chicago is moving to accept the common application.</p>
<p>^^I don’t believe I made that post about U. of C., but it does remind me of something. </p>
<p>James Watson, discoverer of the double helix and U. of Chicago graduate, said that he felt that all the community service by undergrads and high schoolers is pointless. This was right after he had to sit through an award ceremony for community service. His point was that people should be concentrating on developing their mind when they are in school. He said he thinks he has the urge to give back to the community as an adult because he wasn’t forced to as a child. I think there is some value to developing one’s orginizational skills by founding an orginaztion or something, but I think it is WAY WAY overemphasized.</p>
<p>“Why do you think English at Harvard is easy? I know lots of engineers and business majors who would sooner die than have to suffer through another English course.”</p>
<p>This may be true but it is not because the classes are hard. It is because modern literary criticism is a joke. But I digress.</p>
<p>I am quite capable of differentiating between curriculum and admissions, thank you. You are the one who is clamoring for quantifiable standards of admission but exempt the one top schools that is known to put less emphasis on these quantifiable standards. You have not explained why the exemption except that Chicago is known to be rigorous.
So it seems to me that Chicago’s standard include being “capable of doing the work” which you reject as being too low a standard. Care to explain why that applies to Chicago but not to other schools? The bottom 25% SAT scores in 2003 for were: Princeton: 1380; Harvard 1380; Yale 1360; Stanford 1360; Chicago, 1300.</p>
<p>Personally, I think 1300 'qualified" to do the work score. But I’m sure there would be howls of outrage if it could be shown that HYPS had admitted a 1300 scorer over a 1360 or 1380 scorer. I happen to like Chicago’s curriculum AND Chicago’s admissions policies. Chicago knows what it is doing. So do HYPS.</p>
<p>But enough; let’s hear what system you would devise to put in place quantifiable standards.</p>
<p>If you don’t like that definition of “qualified” give me something to work with that has content and is not circular. Is there a meaning with enough content so that when someone says “all of the candidates were qualified” there is someway to figure out what the speaker means other than “they are the ones I selected so of course they are qualiified.”</p>
<p>I have absolutely no idea what you are trying to say. I exempted Chicago and Caltech from the group of schools at which I believe that anyone with above average intellegence could gradutate. I don’t see what this has to do with the number of essays on the Chicago application or their attitude toward standardized tests (about which you have only made assertions and offered no evidence).</p>
<p>I’m the one who made the point about Chicago’s SAT I scores. FWIW, Marite, your numbers for Chicago are out of date. The bottom 25% for the class that entered in 2006 was 1350. (Stanford 1360, P1380, H,1400, Y1400)</p>
<p>Not that it means much for this discussion.</p>
<p>“let’s hear what system you would devise to put in place quantifiable standards”</p>
<p>Why would I want to do that? I just want people to stop using the term “qualified” as though it represented something other than “admitted” or “able to graduate”.</p>
<p>The fact that most students taking AP classes do not take the exams or score below a 3 on the exams mean that the AP labels are suspect. And indeed, this is an issue the CB is trying to address. I am mindful of claims that many schools still have limited numbers of APs and that expecting 4 or 5 might be discriminating against students of those schools. Eventually, perhaps.</p>
<p>The French curriculum is well known and adhered to pretty strictly, come hell or high water, which results in pass rates of 30%. It’s a very different educational philosophy than the American one.</p>
<p>Curious, I gave you my definition before: showing evidence of a capacity to take advantage of the university’s unique resources, and showing evidence of a capacity to contribute something meaningful to the university community. Intellectually, artistically, athletically, culturally, politically, monetarily even (on the give-back side; everyone is capable of taking advantage of the university’s monetary resources). That evidence can take many forms, including SAT scores, but SAT scores, even perfect ones, are not sufficient evidence of anything. I don’t think it can be reduced to a numerical algorithm, unless (as with admissions committees) you have a group of people who understand their scoring system rating evidence that is not homogenous with decent interrater reliability.</p>
<p>To say that people are qualified does not mean they will be admitted, of course. I believe that many more people are qualified at most selective schools than are or can be admitted. I also believe that human beings are fallible, that admissions committees can make mistakes, and that past performance is not a guarantee of future performance.</p>
<p>You want a single factor, and you want it to be a bright line. Too bad. That’s not how the world works. </p>
<p>Very little in life is that simple, except perhaps Asian university admissions. That system may work, but I’m not convinced it works better than ours.</p>
<p>SAT math covers no more than basic algebra, so a student who cannot even grasp the basic concept of algebra thinks that he is so good because he thinks everything else look so good. Who is looking at a flattering mirror?</p>
<p>Why do we need to “figure out” some deeper meaning here? Why should anyone other than Selective Private U. get to decide who is qualified for Selective Private U.?</p>
<p>If Selective Private U. admitted them, then by whatever criteria Selective Private U. uses, they’re qualified. Trying to argue otherwise is like some third party trying to tell you that your spouse is not qualified to be married to you. Or that what you ordered in a restaurant is not qualified to be your dinner. Well, maybe by their criteria the spouse and the meal weren’t qualified, but these third parties have no standing in the case. It’s your criteria that determine “qualified” and not theirs. Same with admissions - it’s only the school’s notion of “qualified” that counts.</p>
<p>I would have no problem with their language if they were honest and said: “Look, we can admit whoever we want, so buzz off.” I might object to the behavior, but the language would be accurate. I do object to them ducking behind a term like “qualified” which appears to mean either nothing or some very low standard. I find the use of the term in this context to be intellectually dishonest.</p>
<p>By the way, to a certain extent there are public policy questions here. Legislation has been introduced, and passed in some jurisdictions, that challanges teh ability of these instituions to have a free hand in defining “qualified.”</p>
<p>By and large I believe, yes, the vast majority of students admitted are qualified, because all of these institutions have a collective process with multiple layers one of the functions of which is to weed out unqualified applicants. Furthermore, for the institutions we are discussing here, the number of qualified applicants so far exceeds the maximum number of acceptances that most of the admissions department’s work is distinguishing among qualified applicants, and there is no conceivable incentive to put the unqualified into the mix. For someone unqualifed to be admitted, a lot of people have to screw up, or someone with power has to be willing to push a lot of people around (and has to have a good reason to do that). That just doesn’t happen very much.</p>
<p>Which isn’t to say that mistakes aren’t made, although I suspect it’s much easier to misidentify an unqualified applicant at the top of the score sheets than at the bottom. To make it into the late rounds of the selection process, a kid with 550 SATs has to have some unmistakable qualities that knock more than one person off their feet – essays, personal achievements, ECs, something. Probably more than a few. A kid with a bunch of 800 SATs could skate through without anyone paying attention to the fact that he’s shown no capacity for independent thought or self-motivated work, and is unwilling to communicate much with others except through artificial tests. Lots of schools will admit such a person automatically, because it’s a good bet that he does have something to offer, and it’s not worth the trouble to check for the one in 10 or 20 of those kids who doesn’t.</p>
<p>Then your operational definition of “qualified” is “admitted.” I actually prefer “able to graduate” (even thoguh it’s a low bar) because in that case it is at least possible, after the fact, to determine how many “unqualified” candidates were admitted. Let’s say I got into a heated argument with an adcom after he said that all of the admitted students were “qualified” and told him I would pay him a large sum of money if he could prove it. How would he do it?</p>
<p>No, my operational definition of qualified is not admitted, because the “admitted” group is almost by definition smaller than the “qualified” group. You are looking for a way to identify unqualified admitted applicants, but to do that you need to assume that there ARE a meaningful number of such people and that they COULD be identified. I assume that there are not a meaningful number of such people, and that it would be exceptionally hard to identify them, although utter academic failure would certainly be one decent indicator if it was attributable to lack of capacity and not intervening circumstances.</p>
<p>But failure to graduate is a crappy metric. I know, or know of, a number of people who failed to graduate from Yale in my generation. Their failure to graduate had nothing to do with their qualifications for admission. They included becoming alcoholic, becoming drug addicts, becoming schizophrenic, being murdered by your boyfriend, going to prison for murdering your girlfriend, graduating from Stanford instead, graduating from Michigan instead, and getting tired of living in a world where there were only a couple dozen people who looked like you. </p>
<p>I believe most admissions offices have some sort of rating system that they use to produce numerical or quasi-numerical scores for things like recommendations, academic achievement, leadership, extra-curricular activities, personal essays, etc., and that the ratings are subject to check so that they are not arbitrary with a single individual. I also believe that they all do some sort of backchecking to refine their rating system based on the performance of the people they have admitted, although probably not too much. So to prove “qualification”, all the admissions officer ought to have to do is to show you the files and the ratings, and to prove that the process was nonarbitrary.</p>
<p>But why should he have to? Of all the problems in the world, what makes you think that the odd unqualified kid sneaking into Stanford is worth anyone’s time?</p>
<p>I think an adcom would have no trouble defining qualified, “we’ve admitted scores of students with similar profiles, and statistically, as a group, they not only graduate, but flourish academically. Can I give you an iron-clad guarantee that a <em>particular</em> student won’t run into trouble . . . . no. Can I guarantee that most of the students in the bottom quartile of the admitted class, including those with seemingly weak stats do way more than just pull through and graduate. . . yup.” </p>
<p>At the risk of a tangent: It’s surprising how often a student that you don’t think has much going for him/her when they start matures intellectually in quite amazing ways. An 18-yr old brain is just not wired the same as a 22-yr old after four years of a challenging education.</p>