MIT admissions dean resigns over resume fraud. Ouch!

Parents Forum
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<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>We are not as far as you think - basically instead of Jewish quotas we have Asian quotas instead (or URM quotas which have the effect of being Asian quotas). I suppose this is a form of “progress”? The idea of “quotas” is misunderstood. Even in the '40s, it was not politically correct to publicly announce “Harvard’s Freshman class this year will include no more than X% Jews”, even though this is exactly what they had in mind and what the adcoms told each other in private correspondence. But for public consumption, they had to do it in a more subtle way (and deny to the public that quotas even existed - sound familiar?)</p>

<p>Here’s a quote from the Washington Post review of the Karabel book The Chosen:</p>

<p>"Proof of extracurricular activities, leadership qualities, letters of recommendation – we take all these as natural, necessary and even enlightened elements of the college application process, though they cause us endless anxiety. Actually, they don’t resemble in the least the way people in Europe or Japan get into college. They’re a result of a particular American challenge at the turn of the 20th century, which President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard then characterized as follows: how to “prevent a dangerous increase in the proportion of Jews.”</p>

<p>They may not have used the word “holistic” - the jargon/euphemisms keep changing (“affirmative action” is now “diversity”). But read the Karabel book I linked to (you can see quite a bit of it with Amazon’s “search inside” feature) - the admissions system that we have to this day (what you would call “holistic”) was created specifically for the purpose of reducing the # of Jewish students and for no other reason. I was shocked to learn this and at first didn’t believe it because we take the “holistic” system so much for granted as “always” having existed since time immemorial, but Karabel presents abundant proof, and not in a sensational National Enquirer kind of way but as a serious historian.</p>

<p>The beneficiaries of the “holistic” scheme have changed but the scheme itself, which given its shameful origins should have been discarded along with other vestiges of our racist past like “colored” water fountains and seating in back of the bus, has stayed firmly in place, repurposed to the currently prevailing societal prejudices. And the other leg of the scheme (denial that “holistic” admissions has a hidden agenda behind it - they’re not discriminating against or in favor of any group, they’re just looking for “leadership quality” and other such intangibles that don’t show up in “mere” scores) has also proved to be remarkably durable and surprisingly effective in the face of much statistical evidence to the contrary.</p>

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The kid or his family or his teachers have to know about the program in order to sign up to be tested, correct? As I recall, the SAT year of birth grid didn’t even have my D’s birthyear on it, so without the CTY program in place, there would be no reason in the world to take the SAT in elementary school. I only knew about CTY because I had seen a tv program on it years ago. The kids in our town participate because their standardized tests scores are viewed & every eligible kid’s parents are presented with the option. D was in a Catholic elementary school, and when I presented the program for them suggest to the top scoring kids, they had never even heard of it. No family was contacted, so I signed D up on my own. I KNOW there had to be other kids in the top 3% of standardized test takers, but I had no tactful way of approaching anyone & making them aware of the program. The school dropped the ball. As D had no interest in participating in any CTY stuff, we only tested for another year. I have no personal knowledge of SET, but the points Percy raises about the SET/CTY kids is valid, whether it is a program, database, or whatever. These kids have already been identified as a highly gifted subset of CTY participants. If CTY/SET is not known to families or schools, the kids are not identified & the likelihood of math enrichment is not as great.</p>

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<p>Not trying to be mysterious, sorry if that’s how I came across. </p>

<p>Just wanted to clarify that you don’t need athletic ability to get into MIT, as evidenced by many of our admits who, like me, aren’t particularly talented in that department - but shine in other ways. An “athletic ability category” would obviously penalize them for choosing, say, piano over football. </p>

<p>The “big deal” is that the dissemination of incorrect information isn’t really helpful to anyone, so I’m just trying to correct the misunderstanding. I don’t think I need to get into the intricacies of our selection process in order to make it clear that one doesn’t need to be a good (or even decent) athlete to get into MIT.</p>

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<p>Ben, I missed the 20-minute edit period, so I have to put this in a new post</p>

<p>You really don’t have to answer any questions, if you’d rather not. I do know that judgment calls are made all the time in admissions, and that’s what they pay you the big bucks for :)</p>

<p>I also forgot to add… Best of luck in the new era of MIT Admissions, and I’m confident MIT will come out stronger.</p>

<p>I won’t address this particular sub-topic again, you might be glad to know.</p>

<p>***cross-posted with Ben. Assuming what you say it true, than I imagine the Admissions Dept. would like to meet with the coaches to clarify for them what the process is or isn’t, if you haven’t already done so – my son told all his friends about this, so please don’t think I’m the only one who disseminated what we were told. I do not wish to disseminate untruths.</p>

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<p>Stickershock - I think we are too much in love with the idea of “undeveloped promise”. We all love an underdog story - remember that movie where Jaime Escalante found a class of tough ghetto kids and they all turned out to be math geniuses once they were given a little TLC. Unfortunately, real life doesn’t work that way. I remember many years ago a wealthy philanthropist “adopted” a class of elementary school kids at a ghetto school in Philadelphia. He promised to pay full college tuition, etc. , even at MIT. Unfortunately, given the disrupted circumstances of their lives (single parent homes, etc. - BTW 93% of SET kids come from intact 2 parent families), he ended up not paying very many college tuitions and none at top institutions like MIT - long before college age, most of the kids had dropped out, had babies, were in jail, etc. One or two made it to community college and this was considered a triumph. Hopkins, etc. are out there beating the bushes for kids with “undeveloped promise” but there just ain’t thousands of “hidden” geniuses out there that nobody has noticed. Our educational system with its abundant testing is sure to “notice” gifted kids - they just don’t do much of anything with them once they notice, but they are pretty good at identifying them. </p>

<p>As allmusic explained very clearly and correctly, you are very much conflating SET with the summer programs run by CTY. They are all under the Hopkins umbrella but they are totally distinct. SET will even waive the testing fee if hardship exists (and likewise the CTY camps offer need based scholarships).</p>

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<p>Stickershock - “The kids in our town participate because their standardized tests scores are viewed & every eligible kid’s parents are presented with the option.”</p>

<p>This is basically how the program operates in most public and private schools today. Your D’s private school just happened to be out of step. The kids who are close to the ceiling on a grade level standardized test given to all students (whatever your state’s “no child left behind” test is) are identified and asked to take an “above grade level” test - the SAT, which separates the merely bright from the truly brilliant. Around 85,000 7th and 8th graders take the SAT in 19 NE states (other regions have their own similar program) , something like 1/3 score above the CTY 550 cutoff but under 500 qualify for SET.</p>

<p>Are they tapping 100% of the kids who could potentially qualify? Obviously not, but I think they are getting a good % of them and basically a demographically representative sample - I don’t know of any systematic bias (indeed as I said before they have outreach (the original meaning of “affirmative action”) to minorities) that would skew the sample from that of the kids that they “miss”.</p>

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<p>Percy</p>

<p>I remember the philanthropist story differently–maybe it’s a different person. In the story I heard, the philanthropist also provided tutors and after school help to the kids that wanted them. This guy, as I recall ,ended up paying A LOT of college tuitions. Real life can work out that way when kids are given appropriate resources, encouragement, high expectations and respect.</p>

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<p>You’re going to need more than one made-up story to convince me that there’s no talent outside of the top 50% income bracket.</p>

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<p>Well, the famous private school my kids attended in middle school was out of step, too. As far as I can tell, every year one or two kids volunteered for this, but it was completely parent-driven and (as I suggested) viewed as weird.</p>

<p>And the notion that SATs separate the “merely bright from the truly brilliant” is pretty laughable, even in 7th and 8th grades. I haven’t looked at the test recently, but I don’t remember anything on it that was beyond 8th grade work at a decent school. Sure, a 13-year-old who can get 700s is probably very smart, but is also probably pretty well-educated, too. In my worm’s-eye view, I know three kids among my children’s friends who did that, and only one strikes me as really brilliant (but also very troubled and cynical). The others are smart, interesting, driven, coddled rich kids who were pushed by their parents, and who were garden-variety strong students with early test prep. I know one other kid who might have done it had she been here rather than in her birth country when she was 13; she’s pretty brilliant, too. My son’s middle-school girlfriend (who I did think was brilliant) was the top female in the state on a 6th grade math test; she wouldn’t have touched something like this with a 10-foot pole. (She spent her summers on sports, and she didn’t actually like math much.)</p>

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Maybe it was the same school my nephew attended. While they did tell the kids who were eligible they also strongly discouraged parents from participating. They seemed to feel that it was bad for kids to do anything academic in the summer, even if they wanted to. CTY was great for my older son, of no interest to my younger one, though both qualified.</p>

<p>My oldest narrowly missed qualifying for SET (I wonder if he might have if he’d reviewed the materials for more than five minutes!) He was a pretty precocious kid, certainly much smarter than either parent. He taught himself to read at two. Took at anatomy text book to show and tell when he was four, and looked up stuff in the index. Public schools did their level best to slow him down and he wasn’t as out there by seventh grade, though we did talk the school into skipping him ahead in math. (Not as far ahead as we should have though. GRRR. But that’s another story.)</p>

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<p>It’s not a “made up” story - its very real. Here is a link to one such experiment (registration may be required):</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2005/05/29/gift_of_college_proves_a_boon_and_a_burden/[/url]”>http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2005/05/29/gift_of_college_proves_a_boon_and_a_burden/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>"In 1991, a man in a suit turned up at Harrington Elementary School, one of the poorest, lowest-scoring schools in Cambridge. Standing in front of the 69 second-graders in the auditorium, he tossed each child a football.</p>

<p>The football is college, the millionaire and Brookline High graduate said. Study and work hard and he would pay their college tuition, he told them. Pick up the ball and run.</p>

<p>Their parents wept with joy, but the students were bewildered. They did not know the word ''tuition" or why college was important. Over the next decade, the extraordinary promise from a stranger would be both a boon and a burden.</p>

<p>If they went straight from high school to a four-year university, all should have graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree this spring. Only four, including Steven Tavares, did.</p>

<p>Most tried some type of college or technical school, and a dozen finished a two-year program. More than half who went to college are still trying to complete a degree. Sixteen, including Vinnie Sousa, dropped out of college. Eight, including Marlene De Sousa, who became pregnant as a teen, never finished high school. Three went to jail for charges ranging from assault to selling drugs.</p>

<p>The struggles of the second-grade class at Harrington Elementary School to fulfill a philanthropist’s dream reveal that the promise of money, counseling, and even a toll-free help line, cannot always trump poverty or family troubles."</p>

<p>Weiss’s experience with the “Belmont 112” was similar - even after much handholding something like a dozen eventually finished a 4 yr. college , 35 dropped out of high school, 19 have felony convictions, etc. AFAIK, zero attended MIT.</p>

<p>This has absolutely nothing to do with income and everything to do with family environment and values. A lot of those Asian kids you see in the picture at Hopkins come from low income families - parents who wash dishes in Chinese restaurants, press pants at drycleaners, etc. But they are highly motivated and involved with their children’s education.</p>

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<p>SAT math covers up to Algebra II (recently expanded from Algerbra I) - this might be 8th grade level math in China but not the US. To give you an idea, a 700M is the 9oth percentile of US college bound seniors (it’s also good enough to get you into MIT if you are of the right color/gender/“creativity” level) . Many of the SET kids (most of whom are 7th graders, not 8th - the cutoff is 700 at age 13 plus 10 pts./month beyond) are significantly over 700. So it’s not as trivial as you make it out to be. Again, out of the 85,000 who take the test (which are already a pre-selected group) only a few hundred make it to SET. Most of the 12 yr olds who take the SAT fit your description of strong students, etc. (again you have to score very high on a grade level test to start with) but only a few qualify for SET. Not every single one of them is a “super genius” like Terence Tao who got a 760 when he was 8 (and has since won a Fields Medal) but most are at least extremely bright - this is something you just can’t fake.</p>

<p>I don’t know what to make of your anecdotes. Again people seem to be confusing the summer programs w/SET. The whole commitment for SET is to spend one morning taking the SAT, period. If someone is headed for an academic career (SET kids are 50x more likely than the general population to receive PhD.'s) this doesn’t seem like too much time away from sports - if it is, maybe academics is not really your thing.</p>

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<p>Percy:</p>

<p>I know this story quite well, since the school is in my backyard, so to speak. You are right that the story did not have a very happy ending. In fact, the school was later deemed to be underperforming and merged with another school that attracts professional, middle class families. It will be some time before the results of these mergers can be assessed as it happened only 2-3 years ago.</p>

<p>As for CTY/SET, our urban community does not do anything to promote testing before junior year. We ourselves–well-educated, middle-class–only heard of it by chance when the RA of a summer program my younger S attended mentioned it to us. He was a college student who had attended CTY earlier. So S took the SAT in order to attend CTY. But he seems to have been the only 7th grader at that particular SAT session at that site. After my S went to high school, he found out that some other students had attended CTY. So, it is entirely word of mouth here, and lots of bright students do not know of CTY or choose to attend different kinds of summer programs. I know of a suburban school system where students are encouraged to take the SAT in 7th grade.<br>
We cannot assume that Talent Searches capture a good proportion of promising middle school students.</p>

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<p>I never said that Talent Search captured a “good proportion” of promising middle school students. Doing a little back of the envelope math, SET’s goal is to capture the top 1/1oth of 1% of the population, which would be around 4,000 students / year nationally out of 4M 12 year olds. SET gets around 460/year in 19 eastern states + DC, so extrapolated nationally a little over 1000 or maybe 1 out of 4. </p>

<p>BUT, and this was my reason for linking to the photo in the 1st place, I have no reason to believe that the kids that they are missing have a demographic composition (race, gender, etc.) that is systematically different from the kids in the picture. So far no one has presented a shred of evidence that there is any systematic bias such that the SET sample is not representative of the overall population of super bright kids - the pool that MIT would be seeking to tap if our society was not wrapped up in all this race/class/gender consciousness.</p>

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<p>Percy, my understanding is that SET grew out of CTY. Maybe they are distinct, as you say, but I have viewed SET as a subset of CTY. CTY kids can take part in many programs based only on their top 3% scores from the standardized tests their schools administer. But the purpose for testing them in areas they had never been exposed to was to identify the true super-gifted kids – the SET gang, who have their progress tracked. The Terra Nova can’t distinguish between bright & gifted because the test is too simple. So while plenty of bright kids hit the TN ceiling, the gifted are not distinguishable from the bright with that particular test. </p>

<p>There are many levels of summer & year round CTY programs, and plenty of kids who are at the SET level take them. Hopkins may be “beating the bushes,” but I assure you that parents at my D’s former Catholic elementary school had never heard of it. Other talent searches can get a kid into SET, also, but nobody at this school had been approached. Even if they had, the middle class families there would be caught between that proverbial rock & a hard place: Not poor enough for hardship scholarships, and not wealthy enough to spend thousands on enrichment programs. And frankly, many parents would never send kids that young away to sleep away camps for any reason. That’s where undeveloped promise comes in: Kids bored in school, but without any outlet to run with their aptitude. </p>

<p>I think the CTY programs may have started out as a way to serve the super-gifted, but have now broadened their mission to give enrichment opportunities for garden variety bright kids because they sure as heck aren’t getting it in many of their schools. How does this relate to college admissions? THose garden variety bright kids, great at math, but not geniuses, might be MIT candidates in engineering, for example, but not math. Math & engineering have a different set of skills & aptitudes required for success. I guess that’s my definition of holistic. A kid with a 700 in math (tested at age 17) is a fine candidate for engineering if he or she proves her creativity and mechanical aptitude with a resume full of tinkering/robotics/etc. Engineering isn’t really THAT math focused. So pulling only SET kids in would be a bit narrow, I think.</p>

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<p>Percy: This is what I was commenting on.</p>

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JHS, I’m not sure what’s even on the SAT anymore, but the program chose the SAT because it covered math kids had not been taught. SO only a truly brilliant kid, having never seen that level of algebra (or whatever), had to use intuitive reasoning, his own natural aptitude, to score highly. Perhaps it is now not as reliable, because more attention has been paid to beefing up the curriculum at many good schools. But its intention was to identify brilliant kids who were isolated & dramatically underserved in their schools. I knew my D was no genius, but I had her take part because I was trying to show how much she needed some type of enrichment work. If you’re not in a famous private school, or a progressive, well respected public, the test results can be a solid, quantitative argument that your kid isn’t being well served .</p>

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<p>Percy-</p>

<p>that story means nothing, though. We’re all well aware of just how deeply the system has failed some lower-class folks. But just because someone doesn’t have motivation does not mean that they are not bright. If you do not educate kids about the importance of education, throwing money and opportunities at them will mean nothing. For every person (like you) who values higher education to the point of obsession, there are as many if not more (way more) that just absolutely do not give a crap and have no reason to give a crap. </p>

<p>On second thought, this philanthropist’s actions seem almost canonically inane. Was he trying to help these kids or was he just trying to prove a point (your point)?</p>

<p>MIT (and other top schools) are not handing out acceptance letters to any and all unmotivated innercity kids just because they have this head-in-the-clouds idea of underdog achievement. They are giving the motivated, bright, and promising students (minorities or no) the opportunity to step outside of whatever environment they grew up in. Advocating testing as a sole means of admissions is like sentencing young people to remain forever in whatever environment they were raised in: If their parents obsessed about education and pushed them to do well on tests and paid for tutoring and all that, then they will succeed. Whereas if their environment is such that shunned education, where the hell would they have any clue about these crazy “gifted” programs?</p>

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That would have defeated the purpose. Kids are supposed to go in completely cold, never having been exposed to the math. Then the distinctions in scores are relevant.</p>

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<p>Percy: Is it society pushing the race/class/gender consciousness of admissions at elite colleges such as MIT, or is it the market? That is, the customer?</p>

<p>If MIT admitted based on objective criteria alone, perhaps becoming heavily populated by males, whites and Asians, would they continue to attract tens of thousands of qualified and desirable applicants? Or would many truly brilliant young people decide that they don’t want to attend a university where everyone “looks like me.” For example, a friend’s son a few years ago turned down Stanford and Rice to attend Berkeley (where he earned a degree in math and computer science and is now working in game design in the Silicon Valley) for that very reason. Berkeley’s diversity excited him; at the other colleges, “everyone looks like me” is what he told his mom. </p>

<p>Elite colleges don’t bend over backwards to build a diverse freshman class for the altruistic purpose of uplifting minorities or discovering hidden genius among the lower income demographic (although that is kind of a nice bonus). Diversity is a selling point and it’s a selling point because it does enhance the quality of educational experience for the “must have” students, the “truly brilliant” and the extremely talented. Those “clear admit” students that every college seeks could vote with their feet if they disagreed with admissions policies; it seems to me that they are the ones that want to have classmates around them who are diverse in race, class, gender, creative talents and the universities are simply meeting their customers’ needs.</p>