<p>“Test scores” is a two-syllable shorthand for “relatively objective and cognitively loaded admissions metrics”, such as test scores, competition results, papers published in refereed journals, patents, and (maybe) grades.</p>
<p>I think the point was not that SAT is the best selection criterion for MIT, but that admissions officers cannot reliably assess pseudo-criteria such as “spark”, creativity, potential to bloom, leadership, passion, etc… except insofar as those have external, objective and universally recognizable correlates.</p>
<p>I agree. But spark can be assessed by looking at the types of ECs a student has been involved in, the college-level courses s/he has taken while in high school, competitions, awards, etc… </p>
<p>The problem with so many discussions is that participants only know GPAs and SAT scores of applicants and proceed to dissect not only their chances of admission but also the admission policies of colleges. They don’t know if an applicant has won a major academic award or not, invented a new device, and so on.</p>
<p>JHS said: “Just to be clear, my earlier Satanist story was, in fact, about SET, not CTY. The student in question was very precocious.”</p>
<p>Before you said “4. The only kid I know who did CTY at Hopkins was inducted into an actual-factual Satanist cult there…”</p>
<p>Substituting “SET” for CTY makes even less sense. You don’t “do” SET at Hopkins - there’s no “there” there - SET does not exist as a physical gathering of kids (except for a couple of hours for the grand awards when there are plenty of parents around to prevent Satanic cult inductions). ALL the SET kids are very precocious by definition. I still don’t know what lesson we are supposed to draw from this anecdote. Perhaps you should add it to this wikipedia article:</p>
<p>Feynman wanted to go to Columbia. At that time the Ivies started to worry about too many Jewish students, and Columbia had the highest percentage of Jewish student. The Ivies realize that if admission are merit based, then they cannot rejected Jewish students from schools like Bronx high school of science. So they needed holistic admission to control the Jewish admission.</p>
<p>So natuarlly Feynman was rejected by Columbia. He never quite forgave them for charging him 15 dollars and then rejecting him. He went to MIT instead. At that time MIT was consider a great engineering school, but not a research university, no one would say HYPM. With the influx of Jewish students and professors rejected by the holistic Ivies, MIT built up its reputation.</p>
<p>When he finished his undergraduate, he applied to Princeton and scored the highest in both Physics and Math in the entrance exam, something that had never happened before. MIT Physcis chairman John Slater wrote a personal recommendation to Harry Smyth of Princeton. Smyth wrote back</p>
<p>Smyth wrote:-</p>
<pre><code>Is Feynman Jewish? We have no definite rule against Jews but have to keep their proportion in our department reasonably small because of the difficulty of placing them.
</code></pre>
<p>So we understand what is meant by fit in admissions.</p>
<p>Eventually he got into Princeton with further help from Slater.</p>
<h2>I agree. But spark can be assessed by looking at the types of ECs a student has been involved in, the college-level courses s/he has taken while in high school, competitions, awards, etc… </h2>
<p>If this was what holistic admissions meant, I would have no problem with it.</p>
<p>Cellerdweller: “Einstein and Feynman are good examples. Neither was anywhere near a superstar in math.”</p>
<p>Wikipedia : " In his last year at Far Rockaway High School, Feynman won the New York University Math Championship." Sounds like a superstar to me.</p>
<p>The problem with your approach (“we’re looking for kids who are “creative” and not necessarily academic superstars” to paraphrase) is that it’s basically BS - to be truly “creative” in math and the sciences you more or less have to BE an academic superstar to begin with - it’s a necessary but not sufficient condition. The fact that your examples of “creative” geniuses as not really academic superstars doesn’t pan out at all proves the converse of the point you were trying to make.</p>
<p>As I said before, the SET group (which later turns into the kids who do really well on other academic measures, scores high on math competitions, etc.) is potentially about 4,000 kids (1/10th of 1% of the population) each year. It would be a perfectly reasonable goal for MIT to identify and recruit among that group of 4,000 the ones it deemed to be the most “creative”, etc. But instead they take from a much larger pool in order to satisfy certain demographic targets and the ones at the lower end of that pool (in shorthand the kids who are circa 700M or even the 8% who are lower than that) , while they might make it thru the MIT curriculum (especially the less rigorous majors) have essentially zero chance of being the next Feynman or Einstein. Don’t kid yourself that you’re going to find some hidden gem in that group whose oustanding “creativity” will make up for his or her lack of mental firepower. Ain’t gonna happen no matter how many anecdotes you invent.</p>
<p>Percy: Not an old wives tale – a next-door neighbor and child of close friends. It cost her parents their marriage. (And we lost a really convenient babysitter.) As for SET/CTY, I apologize for any confusion. This happened over 15 years ago, and I had never heard of the program before that, and hadn’t heard about it since until a couple of years ago. Honestly, except for this neighbor, it’s never been on my radar screen. Let’s leave it as “a rarefied summer intensive math program for 8th-9th graders with SAT math scores > 700 at Johns Hopkins.” And the moral was: you wouldn’t necessarily want to accept all those kids without looking under the hood a bit. (Although the kid in question went to a comparable university, and now has some degree of fame and success in a techie field.)</p>
<p>As for “spark” . . . of course you can judge spark. Hasn’t anyone here ever hired anyone? Do you do it solely on the basis of grades and test scores?</p>
<p>“Holistic” means different things at different colleges. The point I was trying to make, though, was that, too often, discussion of admissions policies are based on incomplete information about the qualifications of individual applicants. And from this incomplete information stem all sorts of speculations about the admission policies of colleges.</p>
<p>Is Feynman Jewish? We have no definite rule against Jews but have to keep their proportion in our department reasonably small because of the difficulty of placing them.</p>
<p>So we understand what is meant by fit in admissions."</p>
<p>BINGO - we have a winner! “Fit”, “Holistic admissions”, etc. has always been about letting in the “right” people and keeping out the “wrong” people when the test scores don’t match up with the ruling class’s notions of who is the “right” kind of admit. In the 40’s it was the Jews who were the overambitious minority who had the top test scores but somehow were still not “suitable”. Nowadays it’s Asian males in that role.</p>
<p>See this book for the whole sordid history:</p>
<p>The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton by Jerome Karabel</p>
<p>I would think some of “the most creative” SET graduates would want to consider all sorts of different schools, not just MIT. I also suspect that a lot of “elite” schools would compete for these kids. I don’t think all those brilliant boys and girls will be left with nowhere to go. This said, high scores in competitions and on tests don’t always equal “most creative” ( at least in my H’s math world) .</p>
<p>No one denies that there were Jewish quotas in the 1940s. But we are a long way from the 1940s. I do not believe that in those days, adcoms talked about fit or holistic admissions. </p>
<p>I agree with Parabella about competitions vs. creativity.</p>
This, in short, is absurd. The vast majority of MIT graduates, 800M or not, are not going to be the next Feynman. They will end up in perfectly respectable careers, doing great things, but they’re not, on average, going to win the Nobel Prize.</p>
<p>I had a 690M. I don’t think I’m going to win a Nobel Prize. But I am in the best PhD program in my field, and I’m joining a very high-quality, competitive lab, where I will conceivably publish some papers in Nature or Cell. My lack of “mental firepower” hasn’t hurt me in science – that is to say, my actual abilities have gotten me where I am, rather than one score on one test I took when I was 16.</p>
<p>Only because it’s incorrect information, and will unnecessarily freak applicants out. I’m not saying the coach intentionally lied; I guess he just must have misunderstood (albeit significantly).</p>
<p>Certainly athletic accomplishment is valued, but so are many other things such as playing an instrument, for example. Our process is not set up to reward one kind of extra-curricular accomplishment over another, as having a “category for athletics” would imply.</p>
<p>Thanks, Ben, for replying on this issue. I was sure that it was a misstatement of MIT’s admission policy to say that there is a five-category rating as described in the post you are disagreeing with. </p>
<p>Thanks too for the comments in the other thread about SAT retakes. I look forward to seeing you or one of your colleagues in my town when you do your fall travel. </p>
<p>Best wishes for a good summer of moving forward to new ideas in the admission office. I guess this thread gives everyone plenty to think about. </p>
<p>Percy, I’m not a believer in straight stat admissions. I really think those SET kids are tracked & show success for many reasons, not just their superior intellect. For example, someone recognized they were bright enough to be tested. Someone cared enough to get them into the program & paid for it. And the kids WANTED to do the summer program. Grouping them as CTY does is a great way to boost social skills, and this is certainly a factor in their later success. These kids are not going to be the odd loner with nobody to relate to. From an early age, these kids were steered to math greatness. BUt I do believe there are kids under the radar, in homes & school districts where CTY & Johns Hopkins are unknown, who show great, undeveloped promise. I would hope MIT & other tech schools are using holistic admissions to draw in those kids, rather than push another agenda. You are correct that “holistic” is a big, squishy, ambiguous concept that can be used for good, or used to cover admissions practices that would be unpopular or controversial or even unConstitutional. </p>
<p>JHS, you said:
Well, I’m quite sure Williams admits holistically, yet they have a neo-Nazi student hanging up Hitler fan club posters on her dormmates doors. </p>
<p>
I agree with this. Just different categories of who is being catered to. The media? Government? ACLU? Wealthy donors? Al Sharpton? How can we mix it up so all our critics are kept reasonably quiet & we look like good guys?</p>
<p>Clarification, not that anyone cares particularly, but I hate misinformation:</p>
<p>SET is not a “test” or a “program”. It is merely a database of kids who scored above 700 before age 13. There is nothing to know about or prepare for in advance, so any kid, anywhere in the country, can take the SAT and qualify.</p>
<p>My son is in SET and has never been to CTY summer programs, we paid nothing but the registration fee for the test in grade seven; he has had absolutely no CTY additional classes or fees related to this database. Occassionally, they ask what he is doing. Oh, and he gets a monthly newletter and magazine…that’s it.</p>
<p>Well Ben, we know from mollie’s post in which Jones herself is quoted in the Tech that there are rating scales from one to five used across several dimensions within AI and PR, so now we really don’t think the coach was very far off in what he told us, if at all.</p>
<p>See post #1372 by Mollie, if you haven’t already – what is your reply to what Jones said?</p>
<p>What’s the big deal anyway? Of course those categories are evaluated and rated by some algorithm. If MIT really wants to open up the admissions process, why don’t they speak more about what Jones was quoted saying? </p>
<p>I think more clarity would remove some anxiety from those students who might “freak” as you call it.</p>
<p>But perhaps MIT likes to keep as much mystery in their admissions process as possible, which goes against what the Admissions Department says about openness… yet another area of double-speak.</p>
<p>And if MIT really wants to keep the mystery going, one would expect Ben to deny what the coach told us, right? Right.</p>
This said, high scores in competitions and on tests don’t always equal “most creative” ( at least in my H’s math world) .</p>