<p>higherlead: If you live in the best educated place in the country all that drilling must have worked.</p>
<p>A sand box would bew quite an improvement on the home life for many I know and would be appropriate. Probably might happen in many preschools here. Of course we do not even have mandatory kindergarten.</p>
<p>garland: What do have against pink? It is one of my top 50 favorite colors.</p>
<p>Well, I wouldn’t throw it out of the crayon box.</p>
<p>MasterofBalances, I agree with you about projects and about middle school. My kid had a great 6th grade teacher who had high expectations, but 7th and 8th grades were a big disappointment.</p>
<p>I’ve since noticed that, at least in our districts, the tracking begins in middle school and extends through high school. I really think this is a major negative influence regarding students taking math and science in college. It may also help to explain why boys, many of whom are late bloomers, are not being as challenged as they should be.</p>
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<p>The only subject in which my middle school tracked was math, and that was definitely a good thing (which only occurred after years of arguments with the principal, who is anti-ability grouping). I can’t speak for school districts other than my own, obviously, but “tracking” here is not a set-in-stone guide to a student’s career the way many people think it is. All one needs to do to get into an honors class is to get a B in the basic level and then get their teacher to sign their course request sheet (and if the teacher won’t, another teacher or a guidance counselor can). I have a friend who started in basic science and math courses and ended up in an advanced physics course with me because she wanted to take it, so she did the work necessary to move up a level.</p>
<p>The one weird thing was that the middle school teachers determined course levels for students who were becoming freshmen - and since, for the most part, by 8th grade there was mutual hatred among the students and teachers, more than a few kids were tracked below their level because of disgruntled teachers. Luckily, freshman courses aren’t too important, and high school teachers are a bit more reasonable on the whole, but that’s probably the most broken part of the system.</p>
<p>Science education as a whole is abysmal throughout the country, with many schools only requiring 2 science courses as compared to 4 English ones. Everyone should have to take biology, chemistry, and physics in high school - as far as understanding the world goes, these are the most important classes.</p>
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<p>I’m glad to hear that it works that way in some places. It’s hard to make generalizations about tracking. If you spoke to most people at my kid’s HS they would say people change tracking levels all the time, but I’ve found that not to be true in math and science. I arranged for 3 sit-down meetings with the math/science department head to get my kid to get into honors math and science at her high school, depsite the fact that she had 3 freshman + sophomore year As going into these meetings. They want kids to have honors math in order to be admitted into honors science, and either they want high As in math in order to be placed into honors math, or they just don’t move kids up (still not sure which). I think this is unrealistic given that math ability is not uniform (some good at calculation, some good at theory, but not both).</p>
<p>When I read about MIT ‘loosening’ standards re: MJ I think about this late-bloomer aspect and can understand considering it’s application, if not at MIT then at least at other schools.</p>
<p>Generally I’ve been disappointed in the content of general education level math and science courses. Those who place into advanced and/or honors are ready for college level math and science; those who don’t are not, at least at our school.</p>
<p>In my sons’ middle school, B in accelerated Math would kick you back to basic. Then in high school the prerequisite would ensure that you will never be accelerated. So how you do you middle school math project determine you future math path.</p>
<p>Cellardweller said: “Percy Skivins: As far as spewing complete BS you certainly top the charts! You have simply no clue about MIT’s admission policies.”</p>
<p>Thanks for the constructive criticism. I especially liked how you explained it all to me, since I was clueless before.</p>
<p>They say a picture says a thousand words. Here are a couple of pictures from the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth “Grand Awards” ceremony from last year:</p>
<p><a href=“http://cty.jhu.edu/about/pressroom/images/2006imagepages/gcimage_page1.html[/url]”>http://cty.jhu.edu/about/pressroom/images/2006imagepages/gcimage_page1.html</a></p>
<p>These are all kids who got 700 or above M or CR SAT in the 7th grade or 750 or above in 8th. If we did not have a long and stressful history of race and gender politics in America and the resulting need to manipulate college admissions, this would be a picture of the MIT entering class of 2012 - in another world these are EXACTLY the kids you would want. MIT could save a lot of time and effort if they just sent those kids their acceptance letters right now and I assure you that they would not go wrong with a single one of them. BUT - look closely at the picture - what you see is mostly a sea of Asian male faces, far out of proportion to their overall percentage of the US population. What you don’t see are any African Americans - not only too few to “represent” their proportion in the general population, but not a single one (I think in some years they do get one or two.) The demographic composition of that photo is the precise and ONLY reason for the MIT admissions system as it exists now. All the other nonsense about “creativity”, etc. is window dressing and ex post facto justification to distract you from the real reason for why they have to run such an elaborate charade instead of just letting in the top scorers on an admissions test - this is how MIT used to run admissions before the US let political correctness rule overcome excellence as a driving force.</p>
<p>Well, MIT actually does accept Asian kids far out of proportion to the general population: its undergrad population is about 28% Asian. That is about the same as the percentage of applicants that are Asian.</p>
<p>Why doesn’t MIT just accept the CTY population? Well, a lot of it is because they’re looking for people who have DONE things outside of the school community and expectations, which is why you see so many FIRST Robotics kids be successful in their applications to MIT and other technical colleges.</p>
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<li><p>There are 90-100 kids in that picture. Anyone want to hazard a guess about how many are ultimately accepted to MIT? (My guess: plenty.) What percentage of those who apply to MIT are accepted? (My guess: a lot higher than the overall rate.)</p></li>
<li><p>Not all of them will apply to MIT, of course. Not all of them will continue to perform at a high level throughout high school. </p></li>
<li><p>Also – not everyone with the talent for MIT applies to CTY in the first place. When I heard that one of my son’s friends had taken the SAT in 7th grade (for CTY), I thought it was horribly weird. Lots of high-performance kids do low-performance things in the summer. My son’s first summer camp counselor was a future MIT student. High-performance kids from low-performance families don’t necessarily start their college applications in 7th grade. None of the top math/science kids in my son’s class this year had any idea what CTY was when they were in 7th grade (and, interestingly, in a school that is about 1/4 ethnic Chinese, none of them are ethnic Chinese, although that’s an anomaly).</p></li>
<li><p>The only kid I know who did CTY at Hopkins was inducted into an actual-factual Satanist cult there, something her parents learned about two years and a LOT of self-destructive behavior later. I don’t think that’s a typical CTY experience, but I don’t know that MIT should be issuing free passes to CTY graduates, either.</p></li>
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<p>Excellence has been mowed down, has it? </p>
<p>Hmmmm… perhaps you mean: before the majority of the US lawmakers embraced Affirmative Action as a method of lifting URM populations out of poverty and under-education.</p>
<p>That is not anti-PC, that is an anti-Affirmative Action sentiment–one that has been expressed ad nauseum on CC over the past four years. You might want to start a different thread if you want to rant about AA.</p>
<p>Paul Graham’s recent essay on judgment seems to be relevant here. </p>
<p><a href=“http://paulgraham.com/judgement.html[/url]”>Paul Graham;
<p>Also, I can’t find information on this. But somehow I have a feeling MIT’s asian population has historically been way lower than its present mark, not higher.</p>
<p>could be wrong.</p>
<p>also, that is a pretty good essay</p>
<p>Regarding MIT, don’t forget the correct phrasing is Asian Americans – MIT limits international (i.e. Asian, African) students to 10% of the class size (or less). Asian Americans are not considered a minority, but are separated for ethnicity stats.</p>
<p>Minority recruitment at MIT hovers just above 20%.
Internationals hover around 10%.
Asian Americans hover around 30% </p>
<p>Which means roughly 40% of the class is devoted to American, non-minority students, and roughly half of those are for female admits… which means that only 20% of the class will be for American, non-minority males… or roughly 200 slots.</p>
<p>Percy:</p>
<p>I don’t see the purpose of feeding a ■■■■■. Others have provided substantive arguments in response to your rants. It seems that you parachute yourself into various threads and pursue an anti-AA crusade whathever the original post of the OP. It seems that you mostly hang out on the Penn boards. Maybe you should stay there.</p>
<p>As your latest response confirmed, you know absolutely nothing about MIT admissions policies past or present. MIT never had a policy of admitting students strictly based on test results. It certainly would not be the place it is today if that was the case. Even MENSA has stopped accepting members based on the SAT and even when they did up to 1994, a relatively low score of 1250 was enough to get in. MIT always looked at achievements inside and outside the classroom to ferret out the highy lopsided kid who developed something in his garage, did well at some science competition, or got an invention patented. The most successful students at MIT are not necessarily the highest scorers coming in. Under your system, Einstein would fail to get into MIT. At least with the current system, he stands a chance. </p>
<p>MIT is also the least likely place for you to make a case on AA, as by default virtually all applicants have stratospheric scores anyway, no legacies and no reserved spots for athletic recruits. With a 25% percentile at over 750 in math and 92% over 700, they don’t need to worry. With no cream-puff majors, MIT graduates more students than any of its direct competitors. It wins more math and science contests than ever, gets record numbers into top medical and business schools, so where’s the beef?</p>
<p>MIT is just not a place that can take unqualified students. It can’t afford the risk of admitting students that won’t hack multivariable calculus (not the AP stuff but real calculus) as it is required of all students. That is simply not something an SAT M or even an SAT II Math test that barely covers basic algebra will tell you. Many who scored 800 on the SAT will barely score a 30 on their math quizzes at first or make sense of their p-sets. Sudoku skills such as those tested on the SAT won’t help you while at MIT. But again, how would you know? You have never even sat in on a class to know.</p>
<p>Your comments about low scoring women applicants is just pathetic. Many of them were valedictorians in HS and most kicked a** in math and science. Not only do they not have lower testing averages coming in, but they succeed just as well or better than the men while at MIT. Did a girl take your spot at your first choice college?</p>
<p>Finally, to place responsibility with MLJ or the Admissions Department generally for pursuing some AA charade to favor lower scoring applicants over better qualified ones is laughable. The policies are set by a faculty chaired committee with 14 members consisting of 6 faculty members, 4 students, 2 members reporting to the Dean of undergraduate studies, one representing financial aid and one representing admissions. If the faculty was not happy with the results, they would have changed the process a long time ago to get a better qualiified class. The students also do not seem displeased with a yield twice that of the nearest tech school. As far as anybody can tell, the system seems to work pretty well. And yes, there is something to the “match” at MIT. </p>
<p>Just sometimes getting informed helps before presenting an argument. But I guess you don’t want to argue, you just want to pursue a crusade and facts just cannot get in the way.</p>
<p>JHS - there’s a major difference between being eligible for or attending CTY camp (which is I think SAT above 550 or something) and “SET” (Study of Exceptional Talent) which are basically the kids in that picture - the cutoff for SET is 700 by age 13 plus 10 pts for every month after. They estimate that 1 kid out of every 10,000 in the general population could be eligible for SET (or in other words 99.99% of the population is excluded). Since there are around 4M kids born each year in the US, there are theoretically around 4,000 who COULD qualify for SET if they were properly identified. But since SET only covers 19 states and not everyone is identified they only get a %, but I think basically a representative %. Hopkins does a lot of outreach and tried to recruit kids from “low-performance” families, but they haven’t dared to do AA yet so the picture doesn’t lie - this is what the top students in America really look like if you don’t put your thumb on the scale.</p>
<p>I really don’t know much about the CTY camps except that it has turned into a big business and they couldn’t produce enough revenue to run the camps on a 700+ cutoff. The 550 cutoff means basically nothing. 83,000 kids/year take the CTY qualifying test and something like 1/3 qualify for the camps. I certainly wouldn’t attach any weight in MIT admissions to attending or qualifying for a CTY camp. However, I think it is improbable that a large (or even a small) percentage of CTY camper become satanists - this is just a laughable slander. What if I told you I knew of one satanist at MIT- would this mean that MIT should be avoided also? Surely you could do better than that level of smear tactic.</p>
<p>SET has been following their kids now for something like 25 years. A lot do end up at MIT. Even more end up at Harvard. As for falling off, maybe a few develop mental illness or something but not many - on the whole the group does extremely well - there’s a Fields Medal winner who is an ex-SET kid, lots of tenure track PhD.s, etc.</p>
<p>You’re right that they couldn’t fill the entire MIT class from the photo group - there’s only maybe 250 /year per grade in SET (only maybe 1/2 of which show up at the ceremony) and they get split up so MIT would be lucky to get 10% of them. But as you say they are not the entire universe of equally bright kids. First of all Hopkins only covers 19 northeastern states (there are other programs for other regions). And as you say not every kid who could take the SAT at 12 takes it. And some other kids are late bloomers, etc. As I said before, SET estimates that there are around 4,000 kids/ year who could be eligible - and I think with an aggressive recruiting campaign (IF this is what MIT really wanted, which they don’t) MIT might be able to snag 1/4 of them and fill the freshman class. BUT, and this was my reason for posting the picture - the Hopkins group is demographically pretty much similar to what you would get if MIT did a pure scores based admissions program - it would basically have the same lopsided race/gender profile. If you look at the distribution of SAT = 800, math competition results, etc. they all have pretty much the same gender/race profile as the group in the picture - the kids in that picture are (a representative sample of) the future 800 scorers of 2012. You could bet money on it. And because they are NOT even close to a representative demographic sample of the general population, they graphically illustrate why MIT can’t run a pure “merit” based admissions system. All the stuff about “creativity” is pure smoke and mirrors to cover up this demographic gap.</p>
<p>I meant to say… American, non-minority Caucasian…</p>
<p>“MIT is also the least likely place for you to make a case on AA, as by default virtually all applicants have stratospheric scores anyway, no legacies and no reserved spots for athletic recruits. With a 25% percentile at over 750 in math and 92% over 700, they don’t need to worry…, so where’s the beef?”</p>
<p>I think you give the “beef” right there in your own stats (or its hidden in there) - basically the 700 to 750 range is a “reservation” for AA recruits. You could argue that the 700s are “good enough” to do MIT level work but I think that they are dragging the quality of the school down below where it would be if MIT had a color/gender blind policy. If you got rid of AA tomorrow, I’d bet that 92% cutoff would be at above 750 not 700.</p>
<p>I’m not an expert on MIT history but I do recall another poster saying that in the pre-SAT (pre-WWII) days admission was by a (very difficult) MIT specific admissions test, period. I don’t know that there was some halcyon age where garage inventors could walk right in. As I said before, all the “creativity” crap is just a cover for AA anyway - I want to know how many really “creative” Asian males are in that 8% below 700 or is “creativity” somehow only found in URMs, females, etc.?</p>
<p>cellardweller said, “and no reserved spots for athletic recruits.” </p>
<p>While what you said is true, MIT does award extra points (up to 5 out of 25 possible total points) to athletes.</p>
<p>There are five rated categories (Academics, ECs, Essay, Tests/Contests, and Athletics) with up to five points in each, with a two in any category meaning automatic denial with no further review of the application. </p>
<p>The coaches send to the Admissions Department a formal request (with points), but the coaches are not guaranteed any admits of their choice. Note that not having a coach’s recommendation does not mean automatic denial, but athletes do get a chance for those extra points.</p>
<p>After the total is computed, other factors play a role, such as gender, AA and demographics, etc, but unfortunately I don’t know how many points those are worth.</p>
<p>So, a (creative) female minority athlete has the best chance of being admitted by having three areas in which to be awarded extra points.</p>
<p>Happypoet:</p>
<p>First of all there are no extra points awarded to women. URMs are given extra consideration but not through some point system. Neither are essays, ECs, athletics, contests rated at the same level as academics. There is no minimum threshold except for academics. You could have no ECs and still get in. If you won some major math or science award you could have slept during your SATs and still get in. You could be in a wheelchair and still get in. Whoever told you the point rule was blowing some heavy smoke! There is no such thing. If you don’t cut it academically, it does not matter that you won the olympics in swimming, you won’t get in.</p>