<p>It is your position that seems absurd to me. You assume that sizable committees of intelligent people spend months sifting through piles of applications to produce a list of students offered admission, and that somehow there’s a significant number of kids in there whom they don’t believe in good faith are qualified, much less “better than” or “more qualified than” the admittedly qualified students they rejected. That’s awfully unlikely.</p>
<p>
Well, there you have it. “Qualified” to attend any school in the U.S., other than Chicago or CalTech but including HYPS and other highly selective schools, can be defined as having “above average intelligence.” The OP has answered his own question.</p>
<p>JHS,</p>
<p>You make the point about “able to graduate” being a low standard very well. The only ones who fail to do it have some kind of personal crisis, rather than difficulties handling the work. And you seem to believe that way more people are “qualified” than admitted, and that virtually everyone who is admitted is qualified. I agree with all of this because the term qualified does not mean a lot. So it is easy to meet. It is so easy, as a matter of fact, that asserting that candidates are “qualified” is no particular defense for admitting them. I just wish people would stop offereing it as a defense for various admissions policies.</p>
<p>jmmom,</p>
<p>I take it then that you agree with that definition: that “qualified” means having above average intelligence?</p>
<p>No curious. That would not be my definition.</p>
<p>Marite:</p>
<p>I am also very familiar with the French Bac which I took in 1975. Things have changed a lot since that time and the current pass rate is now over 80%. </p>
<p>I used to believe that the French secondary school system was one of the best in the world. I no longer do. You can now graduate with a very poor command of the language and the math and science curriculum has been heavily watered down. French high school students used to do very well in international competitions, particularly in mathematics. Not anymore. They have not been in the top 10 countries since 1992. Lack of investment in new facilities, poor pay of teachers and constant lowering of standards has led to general mediocrity. Private catholic schools now vastly outperform the public schools, particularly among the undeprivileged, a complete reversal of the situation of 30 years ago. Certainly not an example for the US.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>Great, then you can give up your little quest, because that’s pretty much what they DO say. Consider this from the Harvard website. Except for Harvard’s language being more polite, there is NO functional difference between their statement and yours:</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>They make it perfectly clear that many factors are considered, that many of them are subjective, and that THEY get to make the decision. There is more than enough subjectivity and wigggle room here to easily accomodate the statement you say you are are willing to accept.</p>
<p>Harvard makes it perfectly clear: “There is no formula for gaining admission to Harvard.” You can’t state it any plainer or more honestly than that. Your vain attempt to objectively define “qualified” is an attempt to understand the formula. There is no formula.</p>
<p>cellardweller:</p>
<p>Interesting about the pass rate!</p>
<p>My brother took his daughter out his local lyc</p>
<p>Marite;</p>
<p>My two brothers are in a similar situation where their kids are enrolled in a public magnet school (Lycee International in St Germain) that weeds out all the marginal students so it can claim a 100% pass rate. I still remember when the IB used to be considered a joke in France and anyone reasonably prepared for the French Baccalaureate would easily score 6 and 7s on the IB subparts. Now, it is the opposite and a fair percentage of student passing the French Bac fail to get passing grades on the IB, and I don’t believe it is because the IB has gotten that much harder. It just has not devalued as much as the French bac. </p>
<p>I agree that the negative trend started after '68. After getting the absolute right of entering university after the bac, now it is every student’s absolute right to graduate from high school. No wonder France has one of the highest unemployment rates among university graduates! There is no selectivity left in the system except for the dozen or so Grandes Ecoles which cater to the elites. </p>
<p>I was recently gently trying to dissuade a bright francophile friend of our D from applying to the Sorbonne as an undergraduate explaining to her that it may not have the cachet it once had and that a site visit may be a good idea before she applied. I told her that anybody with the Bac can attend the Sorbonne and that the students barely have enough chairs to sit on after the facilities were ransacked during the 2006 student strike.</p>
<p><a href=“epiphany:”>quote</a>
Oh, no question. We all know how stupid English majors are, particularly those at Harvard. And we all know how eminently more brilliant all science majors are.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Are you aware that at Princeton, the val/sal designations have gone almost entirely to math, science and engineering majors in the past decade? That’s with relatively harsher grading in science subjects compared to humanities.</p>
<p><a href=“cellardweller:”>quote</a>
I used to believe that the French secondary school system was one of the best in the world. I no longer do. You can now graduate with a very poor command of the language and the math and science curriculum has been heavily watered down. French high school students used to do very well in international competitions, particularly in mathematics. Not anymore. They have not been in the top 10 countries since 1992.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>The top levels of research in France are still world class. Whether an ENS or Polytechnique degree is what it was 30 years ago, I don’t know, and the watering down of the bac is even known outside France by now. International competitions are more, er, competitive than they were in 1992, so not making the top 10 is by itself far from a black mark on the French educational system.</p>
<p>“That’s with relatively harsher grading in science subjects compared to humanities.”</p>
<p>No. 1, You have no evidence for the above statement (“relative harsher grading”)</p>
<p>No. 2, Many students capable across the board – in sciences and in humanities --choose one over the other, while being stand-out in both. You do have to choose at P; you cannot double-major. Choice of major is no indication of superior ability. </p>
<p>No. 3, There could be reasons for the vals/sals going to science majors, in fact proving the opposite of your assumption: one being that in fact the grading was slightly or greatly “easier.” A second might be greater interest in becoming sal/val on the part of those students, vs. different foci for other students (both science & non-science). Like many other private U’s, P has wonderful on-campus & off-campus opportunities. Those who have already been Val at their own highschool are sometimes more interested in taking advantage of the many enriching academic & nonacademic opportunities available in such an environment, giving themselves permission to get a B or two prior to graduation.</p>
<p>siserune:</p>
<p>Not being among the top ten is not the end of the world, but falling to 44th place after countries like Peru and Lithuania as in 2007 is pretty awful. </p>
<p>I also believe that ENS and the Ecole Polytechnique are still world class institutions but they are among the few exceptions in a sea of mediocrity. (Even at ENS and EP the heavy use of part time faculty as the brain drain of top professors to the US accelerates is not encouraging!). A number of these two schools top graduate students also leave to pursue advanced studies in the US where they have much greater resources and opportunities.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That was already true in the 1970s. One of my friend was a Polytechnique graduate who went to MIT for his math Ph.D.</p>
<p>One of my brothers did his DES (now DEA?) in math at Nanterre and made me very very glad to have come to the US. I went back to Paris in the late 70s to do research and was greeted with strikes by university profs who protested their working conditions, including overcrowded classes. Cellardweller, you might remember the TV reports of profs holding classes in metro stations of abandoned warehouses?</p>
<p>re: the relative ability of Princeton’s humanists and its techies,</p>
<p><a href=“epiphany:”>quote</a>
You have no evidence for the above statement (“relative harsher grading”)
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Or maybe I have such evidence, and elected not to detail it in a short comment. For example, note the graph in the article below, of Princeton course grades by subject. Natural sciences courses have the lowest grades, engineering and social sciences (i.e. economics) the next lowest, and humanities the highest.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/1998/02/18/news/6026.shtml[/url]”>http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/1998/02/18/news/6026.shtml</a></p>
<p>
</p>
<p>In theory, no. In practice, at population level, there’s a positive correlation, for many reasons. At Princeton, historically, being the only top 3 general university with a serious engineering program allowed it to draw students who were very strong but still capable and interested in liberal arts (e.g. Caltech and MIT material who didn’t want a pure tech school). This selection effect worked in reverse for the best humanities students, for whom the cross-admit battle was usually lost to Harvard and Yale. In general, and especially in the Hargadon admissions era, Princeton would admit plenty of humanists with little science background, but few if any scientists who were weak in nonscience subjects. That already unbalances things in favor of the scientists and engineers, so indeed one expects that they would be on average a stronger group and produce more star students.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I think the same pattern was found at Harvard.
I would, however, distinguish between easy grading practices and easy disciplines. The brilliant surgeon (Harvard College and HMS) I met a few years ago shuddered as she reminisced about her roommate’s reading load. The roommate was an East Asian Studies major (humanities). For the pre-med major, the hundreds of pages of reading per week per class was a huge load. I am sure that for the roommate, the weekly problem sets seemed equally hard.
Take the guidelines for senior theses in two fields, math and history. The maximum recommended number of pages for a math thesis is 25 (“profs do not want to read more than that”); the minimum for a history thesis is 80, the maximum is 120, and anthropology, I believe has no maximum. On top of that, many thesis writers do fieldwork in order to produce the thesis. I would not say that a shorter thesis is easier to write, or that a longer thesis is easier. They are very different beasts.
As Mollie’s story about her boyfriend suggests a 580 score in writing did not prevent him from being admitted to and flourishing at MIT; as calmom’s story about her D suggests, a score of 580 in math did not prevent her from being admitted to Barnard and flourishing as a major in Russian studies.
This is why I think that looking at individual SAT scores is more useful than the overall score.</p>
<p>Marite:</p>
<p>How ironic! I am actually a Polytechnique graduate (X as they are called) who went to MIT for an advanced degree. Unfortunately, I never got to enjoy EP when the campus was still in the middle of the Quartier Latin. I entered when they just moved the campus to its new facilities in Palaiseau, 20 miles south of Paris. We called it the “beet field”. I convinced four other EP grads, all of Lebanese descent, to join me in the US, the same year. They all started successful technology businesses in Silicon Valley and Boston and never looked back.</p>
<p>I do remember the professors in the metro! These days, if the situation was repeated I don’t think the students or professors would show up. They would be too afraid of being beaten up!</p>
<p>Cellardweller,
Another brother attended EP in the late 50s and went on to Sup Aero! He had a much much better time than the one who went to Nanterre when you had to run the gauntlet of drug dwellers on your way to classes.</p>
<p>coureur,</p>
<p>I do have a problem with Harvard’s admissions practices but that is not what this thread is about. I guess you just closed your eyes tight and avoided reading the second part of my post, admissions decisions are a issue of public policy and they do not have free reign to do as they wish, they could not for example exclude blacks.</p>
<p>Since the statement you quote does not use the word “qualified” it is not relevant to this thread. If you want to post another thread to argue about Harvard’s admission policy statement, I’ll join you there and we can argue about it.</p>
<p>^^The statement you said you were willing to accept:</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>…doesn’t use the word “qualified” either and yet by your own choice is relevant to the discussion. Also Harvard’s statement easily accomodates current public admissions policies. So again, the problem is solved. You can stop looking for this specific and objective formula that doesn’t exist.</p>