<p>For parents who are interested in a program distinct from SET for profoundly gifted (not my term–just a term I’m adopting from other authors) young people, see </p>
<p>and the various resources linked to from that page. </p>
<p>I think the MIT admission office is quite aware of the Davidson Institute programs, although of course MIT’s admission officers don’t make any promises about results to young people who haven’t even applied.</p>
<p>“MIT is not picking females, or certain races, or anything else instead of academic and intellectual ability. They are selecting amongst qualified academic students as the initial “cut”. Then other factors kick in.”</p>
<p>And yet surprisingly those other factors have an incredily consistent distriution year in and year out as they produce classes with virtually the same racial and gender breakdown. It is ovious what MIT and every other elite college in the country is doing. They are predetermining class racial and gender makeup BEFORE examining a single application and digging as deep into the available pool of applicants to fill the predetermined mix.</p>
<p>That is fine if they want to do - fine in the sense that nobody can stop them from doing it. Well technically I guess we could stop them from doing it. We got bigots out of the schoolhouse door before, but of course those bigots were NOKD.</p>
<p>If I take a seed and plant it in rich soil and water and fertilize it and protect it from pests it will grow and flourish to the extent that its genetic makeup will allow. If I take the same seed and throw it on rocky soil it may die or grow but never ear fruit. The genetic potential is only met if the environmental factors are optimal. If there are too few of some minorities out at the thin edge of the Bell curve it is way more likely to be a reflection of rocky soil and poor nutrition than an indication of innate disparities between the races.</p>
<p>But here is the real rub. We can’t fix the problem when the cohort is 18 years old. We need to fix it starting at birth -270 days.</p>
<p>well, with N=10,000-20,000 , I think statistically you would expect a somewhat stable distribution within the general applicant pool (in terms of talent, even creativity) from year to year. I can’t see any reason it would fluctuate wildly as you predict.</p>
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<p>Aside from the fact that top schools practice affirmative action- as they have publicly announced that they do, I think this situation is anything BUT obvious. There are a million factors involved and way too many things to consider and honestly, if any one statistic/story/argument convinces you either way, then you are only seeing what you want to see.</p>
<p>“then you are only seeing what you want to see.”</p>
<p>Of course nobody is going out of their way to open the process up to scrutiny either. Disaggregated test and gpa score would quickly reveal that “all those other holistic factors” not only are not equally distriuted across race and gender groups, but rather are amazingly concentrated among otherwise lower scoring groups.</p>
<p>Now in the big scheme of things I don’t care a fig that MIT or any other elite school choses to discriminate along race and gender lines. The only thing that annoys me about it is their holier than thou attitude. The fact is they aren’t any different then the Empire Tavern back in my home town that became a private club the first time a black guy tried to buy a beer. It was hellaciously exclusive place too. They had holistic admission policy - you had to be white and have a quarter to join. You see they were looking for just the right mix. They were so concerned about it that my Italian neighbor who was a carpenter and worked a lot with his shirt off had to drop his drawers and show his butt to join.</p>
<p>So as I have asked before why does it surprise anyone that an organization that willfully misrepresents what it is doing should attract a person who willfully lied about her credentials? Birds of a feather.</p>
<p>You state a theorem you give a proof. You state a “fact”, you better give some pretty convincing evidence.</p>
<p>You have zero evidence other than that you THINK if the stats come out they will look a certain way. Well, I think the earth is flat, does that make it a fact? I think MIT has said openly that it practices affirmative action toward minorities. Where’s the misrepresentation?</p>
<p>And just one question: walk into Empire Tavern in your (pretty backwards sounding) hometown: what do you see the most of? Is it blacks?? If you’re trying to argue reverse racism you just have no case. Abuse of the term aside, the two race groups best represented by the MIT student body are whites and asians- exactly the groups that are supposedly “discriminated against”. 30% of the MIT student body is asian. Less than 30% of the applicant pool is asian. The U.S. population consists of 4% Asians (asian-americans).</p>
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<p>I can’t grasp how that could possibly mean anything.</p>
<p>But anyways, that’s all I’ll say on this. I’m bored of this topic.</p>
<p>Science also means that when you don’t have data you keep quiet. Science does not involve using the absence of data to intone ominous hints about looking under dangerous rocks, as though knowing in advance (before having the data) what the results would look like. </p>
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<p>You haven’t answered the point. The hypotheses you want considered, and the levels of skepticism, are not distributed equitably among all a priori reasonable hypotheses. The process of hypothesis selection is not only not objective, it’s not race-neutral.</p>
<p>What is the source for the second statement? No private university publishes its admissions rates by race and gender.</p>
<p>MIT needs to overadmit Asian females in order to gender balance, which means underadmitting Asian and white males (i.e. making room for minority males) to accomplish racial AA goals. The Asian statistics will be quite skewed if broken down by gender. You can already see this in the Harvard factbook numbers, and Harvard is not an engineering school.</p>
<p>I was wondering how long it would take for Percy Skivens to show his true colors, and began hoisting the flag of “genetic inferiority”. Not long, apparently…:rolleyes:</p>
<p>“It was a correct and precise usage. What’s wrong, it wasn’t on the SAT wordlist for CTY?”</p>
<p>what is this supposed to mean? Do you have something against CTY? Too elitist for you? </p>
<p>God forbid someone who wants to actually get an education takes the SAT early… The extremes in intelligence have the most problems in the school district–does it bother you that the actually have a way out? That they actually have a place that celebrates their intelligence instead of trying to destroy them?</p>
<p>The SAT is obviously almost completely unreliable because you can study for it, right? Just like the NFL combine is completely unreliable. So what if a kid runs a 4.2 40 yd. dash at age 14; they probably trained for it so it means nothing. Or the bench press. If a person lifts 500 pounds, then it doesn’t mean they actually have some genetic talent toward strength. After all, they lifted weights to improve to that level. Oh, I forgot. People have no problem with early achievement in sports. The central premise people use again and again is that if you can train to improve at something, then achievement in that area is not indicative of pure talent.</p>
The purpose of sending untrained kids in to take the SAT is a way to seperate levels of talent. It would take extraordinary natural aptitude to see complicated algebraic equations for the first time & be able to solve them intuitively. That’s the kind of talent that seperates the SET kids from the larger CTY pool (which is the top 3% – or was until recently --on nationally normed tests.) Any kid qualifying for CTY has talent. But the level of math achievement you can expect from a SET kid will be miles ahead of a bright, even gifted, CTY kid.</p>
<p>My point is that kids who achieve anything academically are unfairly dismissed with the argument, “well, they studied for it or took a test prep course so they actually don’t have any real talent.”</p>
<p>There is absolutely no question that kids can prep for the SAT and improve their scores.</p>
<p>The difference is the kids for whom there is no prep necessary (or they won’t buy into doing prep) and are very high scorers. These kids do have unusual ability, and it is quite different than the ability of those who spent hours and hours doing practice tests, learning strategies, words, “plug-ins”, tricks and what-not.</p>
<p>My S#1 is a “member” of SET and went to CTY for 6 summers. Did no math AT ALL there. He has no particular interest in it. His 1st grade teacher had told us that he was the most intuitive math student she had taught in her 25 years of teaching. He didn’t get it from me and he didn’t get it from my H and he never opened a test prep book in his life. We even tell his brothers that he is just “wired differently.” It happens.</p>
<p>I don’t think that is correct. By the time my S took the SAT in 7th grade, he’d finished pre-calc. So, one can say that he had “trained” for algebra and geometry, unlike the kids who had never seen an algebra problem before. Indeed, many students who take the SAT in 7th grade have encountered algebra problems before (even if they’re not so labelled). Just as kids who are voracious readers have “trained” for the verbal section even if they’ve never seen vocabulary lists or flash cards. Is it any wonder that Talent Searches attract a largely middle-class pool?</p>
<p>The kids who score high on the SAT as 7th graders do have high ability; but the SAT is only a validation of the ability which they often have demonstrated in other ways–by and reading and doing math above grade level. Finally, while members of SET are indeed highly advanced, 7th graders who score in the 500s range are performing at the same level as college-bound seniors. They, too, are advanced, and deserve to be allowed to perform at their own level.</p>
<p>There are some claims and counterclaims here about statistics and IQ testing, so I thought I’d cite to the thread an interesting, quite technical book about many of the issues we are discussing here. [Intelligence</a>, Genes, and Success: Scientists Respond to The Bell Curve](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Genes-Success-Scientists-Respond/dp/0387949860/]Intelligence”>http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Genes-Success-Scientists-Respond/dp/0387949860/) is a compilation of articles by many leading authors on IQ testing, statistics, and other issues related to controversy about ethnic patterns in test scores. It deserves a careful reading by anyone who wants to follow the data on those issues. Some of the authors of individual articles in that volume have published more recent articles I have read. I’d be delighted to hear from the statistically trained participants in this thread how the professional literature sums up current research on the issues we are discussing here.</p>
<p>Does anyone have any data on how SET-eligible young people do subsequently on the AIME? I get the impression that admission officers at MIT (and Caltech, for that matter) look more for high AIME scores, which are rare </p>
<p>It would be very strange indeed if MIT or other colleges looked for high SAT scores in middle school. These are not kept by the CB so cannot be corroborated in most cases.<br>
As for AIME, not every high math ability student takes part in AMC competitions. Again, it depends on whether the district or the school encourages it. Ours did not. The very math teacher who encouraged my S to do pre-calc in 7th grade was uninterested in MathCounts despite having enough advanced students in his class to field an impressive team. Several suburban schools, meanwhile, strongly supported MathCounts, and the high schools encouraged participation in AMC competitions. I expect this discrepancy in math competitions is widespread nationally.</p>
<p>S’s HS did not participate in competitions. S got interested (I don’t know how), formed a math club, got a teacher to be sponsor, and now the HS routinely has kids participate in these competitions. Scoring well on AIME is helpful for kids from a relatively unknown HS to be taken seriously at high calibre tech colleges.</p>
<p>MIT is one the few schools that has a spot for the AMC/AIME score right on the application. Not taking it won’t hurt but qualifying for the AIME (top 5% of AMC scores) is seen as a positive and a high score on the AIME (7 or better) can be decisive.</p>
<p>I had never heard of MathCounts until S reached 7th grade. I suspect most parents at our k-8 school had never heard of it, and the teacher who had was not interested in it. In the high school, some students got interested in forming a math club and partcipating in AMC, but they received really minimal support from teachers; I’m not even sure if it’s still active! As well, the students who got into MIT were not in the math club. They all belonged to the more established and more fun Science Team whose meetings often clashed with the meetings of the math club.</p>