Modest Proposal: The Super-Stat

Applying to College
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<p>“why are points subtracted for taking the SAT a third time? it’s bad to take it a third time?”</p>

<p>At SSU, we believe that the most capable students will achieve very high scores in one or two sittings of the test.</p>

<p>As to Juillet’s critique, some of the points are worth considering, but I would remind you that at SSU, all the students will be high-scorers, not just in the SATs but in APs as well. We believe that having a cadre of students with the same level and types of ability will promote healthy competition and achievement.</p>

<p>As for attracting faculty, we believe that SSU will be very attractive to many families willing to make sacrifices to pay the very high tuition, and this will allow us to provide very competitive compensation for faculty.</p>

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<p>I haven’t read the entire thread, but I did read the proposal and defenses thereof. </p>

<p>I don’t think profs at the most selective universities WANT to teach the students who are most accomplished on average across a broad spectrum of subjects. They want to teach the kids who are geniuses in their subjects. Even at colleges with cores and certainly at those with distribution requirements, at least 40% of your course work will be in your major. </p>

<p>Do you think a Nobel prize winner in chemistry cares what scores the students in his upper level classes got on their AP foreign language tests? I don’t. If they could admit the students who will major in chemistry, I suspect they would admit by chemistry scores, other science scores, research and publications, participation and success in Intel, etc. </p>

<p>Real life example: I know a young woman, now in her early 30s, who scored in the 1300s on the 2-part SAT and who was admitted to a school in the HYP group. Even back then, that was pretty rare for a white, upper middle class kid. It helped that her parents were both alums, I’m sure. But two things made her app stand out. </p>

<p>First, she achieved an 800 on the Chinese with listening exam. This is a white kid. Neither of her parents speak any Chinese. She started studying in at school with no background at all. In 3 academic years she mastered it well enough to get an 800. She did so in part by volunteering at a senior center for Chinese immigrants. She also got 800 in French and Spanish. </p>

<p>Second, she is a fantastic writer. At the end of her first year of college, she won two prizes for the best work by an undergraduate submitted in an English class that year in two different genres. The last person to do that as a freshman --more than 50 years earlier–is one of the most famous and highly regarded American novelists. </p>

<p>I don’t think the English department at her alma mater cared that she was pretty weak in math. She’s making a living as a professional writer now. </p>

<p>Lots of kids score 800 on the math SAT I and SAT II and get a 5 on BC calc but aren’t good enough mathematicians to qualify for the USAMO. And lots of the kids who ARE USAMO level in math are weak in some other subjects, in the contest of all high stats kid. My kid has a acquaintance who is a math genius–now a post doc at a top U and he’s not yet 30. He scored a 3 on AP French–that’s not terrible, but it would keep him out of high stats U. It did not keep out of Harvard, where he was a math TA starting his sophomore year. He is, BTW, a fantastic teacher. As a Ph.D. student, he won several teaching awards. </p>

<p>As I assume many of you know, Yo Yo Ma attended Harvard. He was also accepted at Julliard. He rejected his father’s and his teachers’ advice to attend Julliard because he wanted a chance to learn something about subjects other than music. It was an unusual decison at the time. Yo Yo Ma was already a well known cellist when he started college. Maybe he’d have taken the AP test in music theory, but, while I know he is brilliant, I doubt he was racking up 5s on a multitude of AP tests and I doubt with practice and his touring schedule he had time to take a SAT prep course. Would anyone think Harvard made a mistake in admitting him? </p>

<p>My offspring attended a NYC public magnet. Test scores tended to be very, very high. There were, however, kids at the top of the class who participated in very few, if any ECs–and I’m defining ECs broadly to include jobs. These kids studied 6 hours a day to get their grades and test scores. Really…are these the kids the top colleges should accept? </p>

<p>Would Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, et al. be as prestigious without school newspapers, radio or TV sations, athletic teams, student orchestras, marching bands and the gazillion other ECs going on at these places? I’ve never heard Princeton’s but both Harvard and Yale’s student orchestras are amazing–and most of the kids in them are not music majors and have no intention of becoming professional musicians. I kind of doubt high stat U’s orchestra would be as good.</p>

<p>One of the reasons the top schools are the top schools is because they accept the well-lopsided kids–the kids who are <em>stars</em> in 1-2 disciplines. In the real world, these are the people who will go on to be the superstars–the ones who find a cure for cancer, write and direct a Broadway show, create the next Facebook, etc.</p>

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<p>I can’t believe people are even discussing this.</p>

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<p>Most IB students do not take the AP exams. It is often not even possible to do so, as AP and IB exam times conflict, and neither can be rescheduled. Further, IB exams occur during May of senior year, well after the college application process is over.</p>

<p>Taking all the AP exams for their IB subjects would be insane, as diploma candidates are already taking 6 subjects, which requires them to sit for as many as 18 exams for the IB alone.</p>

<p>I saw someone mention that IB SL exams aren’t considered as rigorous as AP exams. That is true. However, the common perception is incorrect, and the IB is not yet understood very well in the US. IB SL exams are as rigorous as or more rigorous than AP exams, and IB HL exams are far beyond AP exams.</p>

<p>Regardless of the poor handling of the IB, this idea is entirely ridiculous in the first place. Admitting students on stats alone results in rejecting many of the students who will be most successful and accepting some extremely useless students without practical skills. Further, it creates a student body that is less likely to have a rich variety of extracurricular activities, which are an important part of any college campus.</p>

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<p>AP exams can be rescheduled; my school does so every year for IB students.</p>

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<p>Oh…I was told otherwise. Well, either way, the point stands that it’s a ridiculous number of exams, especially considering the difficulty of both sets of exams.</p>

<p>Further, AP and IB exams don’t cover the same topics, so preparing for all the topics on IB exams doesn’t mean you’ve prepared for all the topics on AP exams.</p>

127

<p>While most of this thread is fanciful, I will note that at my kids’ IB program, many kids do in fact take multiple AP exams in tandem with the IB exams in order to get college credit or acceleration.</p>

<p>The whole thread is old (although it’s one of my favorites), and jonri’s comments are several months old, too, but I really wonder if SSU would really be such a barren place. After all, a lot of universities worldwide use a system not so different from this. What are they like? Do they have vibrant extracurriculars? And even if you admitted basically on scores, wouldn’t a large percentage of kids from American high schools want to do ECs in college anyway?</p>

<p>As to faculty, we’re going to lure them with high pay.</p>

128

7 years later on a re-read of this thread, I find I am curious as to to what @Hunt thinks about the “pointy” possibilities of SSU. Should/could SSU be broken into colleges/schools that have their own set of SS admissions standards (stats-based of course) for the school of math, or the school of foreign language, or the school of what-have-you, as @jonri sort of suggests? Or must SS admits be super in all subjects equally?

I hope the moderators will allow me to post on an old thread, since I doubt anyone else has started a similar one in the past 7 years…

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Would I receive no additional points for taking 14 AP classes as opposed to 1? Interesting concept though, and heck, maybe some admission counsellors have some semblance of this system secretly set up at there school to place students within a range in which they can then focus on evaluating the non-statistical factors of the application

130

My first thought was that the OP must work for the College Board. :wink:

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The College Board should pay me for this, but they haven’t. @OHMomof2 , my concept for SSU was kids who were good at everything, but clearly other schools could be created that use modified versions of this approach. And @Jcannon1023, you do get extra points for taking more AP tests under the formula in the first post. (You get no credit for AP, or any other classes, just for the tests