That is not necessarily true that high contest math scores mean you will do well on SAT tests in general. Also in general Harvard admission doesn’t care about contest winners unless it is the Olympics or a political contest.
That’s true in general, but a high AIME score (>10ish) requires extremely high intelligence. Unless there is an English language problem, 1550+ on the SAT should have required very little prep, as I predicted in post #8 above for the OP, apparently now confirmed.
Do you have any studies to back that up? Lots of kids who excel in math also don’t do well in contest math or simply dont like it.
No, @collegedad13, just personal experience and intuition. I’ve worked with a few young kids (younger than 13) who qualified AIME but were not high scorers (yet) and they generally scored 1450-1520 on their SATs taken at the beginning of 7th grade for talent searches. Some prep of course, but not very much.
You are definitely right that some kids who excel at math don’t like the contests or even do well in them (they might want to look into USAMTS though, if they do not like the speed or timed aspect of most contests). It’s not the contest experience that makes the SAT a relatively easy task, it’s the intelligence needed to place well at the AIME level, if that makes sense. A highly intelligent kid who excels at math but doesn’t do contests will also do very well on the SAT, and will need minimal prep!
“Also in general Harvard admission doesn’t care about contest winners unless it is the Olympics or a political contest.”
That is not true, I posted on another thread where 25% of Intel winners (maybe semifinalists and finalists as well), over the last few years are at Harvard. In fact from the article in the Crimson, Harvard touts the possibility to continue their research in college, meaning Harvard is recruiting them like they do athletes. As Satchel points out, there are only a handful of these applicants in any given year, so while they may not get into every college they apply, they do get in to a few of the most selective ones.
H won’t swoon over an Olympian or political winner - or Intel winner- if they don’t match in other ways. Why assume the only thing that got someone in was a contest? You’ve got to question correlation vs causation.
So, OP, you’re still flying without a net? The rush of the risk? No matter how many posters encourage based on your contest wins, share the excitement of going into the SAT cold, or insist you’re set, they aren’t the ones who’ll judge your app. As i said, let tippy top adcoms catch wind of your style and watch them question your judgment.
Your choice. But how you make the decisions will say a lot about your savvy. Or if this just about the moment or the high.
What were 3 years of rigorous high school courses if not preparation for college readiness exams? You realize that in college you won’t necessarily be able to pull a B up to an A with the final, right?
I don’t know what posters who like your style are seeing. I work at a private, selective college and if the attitude in your posts came through on your app I don’t think you’d be admitted. Our school gets many more applications
from qualified students than they have spots to fill. @lookingforward has some excellent points. You should take note of them.
Congrats on a great test score. Understand that most applicants to highly selective colleges will have great test scores and great GPAs. Your stats are not going to be an issue, in all likelihood. Colleges want to admit people they like. Your teacher recs are going to be very, very important. Choose wisely who you ask to write them.
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A naked guy, action/inaction of Cambridge police, and racism are no no way related to the original post. 10 posts deleted.
“H won’t swoon over an Olympian or political winner - or Intel winner- if they don’t match in other ways. Why assume the only thing that got someone in was a contest? You’ve got to question correlation vs causation.”
It’s correlation and they shouldn’t mess up the other parts of the app, I agree, but they don’t have to match in many other ways. This is not like valedictorians where you have tens of thousands, you have just handful of these. Also they already have experience that these award winners fit well, maybe contribute immediately to a professor’s research.
“No matter how many posters encourage”
I now, encouragement rather than discouragement and judging, surprising on cc.
“I don’t know what posters who like your style are seeing.”
It’s more an edge than a style, adcoms imo, know that many people who made a mark in their industry or country have an edge. Steve Jobs is probably the best example, his recommendations :
- difficult to work with, insults people without reason, poor interpersonal skills (weaknesses)
- thinks and sees the world differently than anybody I've taught, will disrupt the status quo wherever he is (strengths)
Accept or reject?
Considering how many kids take rigorous high school courses, then, we should be seeing 1550+ literally all the time!
+1!! It’s a risky approach of course to present as edgy, and so it will be hit or miss. The alternative is to sit back and take your chances as a plain vanilla candidate facing <10-20% odds as an unhooked but very high ability/high achievement kid at a school like Harvard, most of whose applicants are adhering to one standard script or other. (Yes, I know the stats might suggest even lower odds, but remember most unhooked applicants are basically instant rejects.)
Nah. Adcoms are building a community first. Your future is in your hands.
No one is saying sit back and be vanilla. But OP is taking risks with ordinary school tasks. It’s not as if he reached out and stretched in other real world ways. It’s just hs antics. He needs to get real.
You don’t stand out in an app pool by pulling a grade save in the last week. There’s so much real accomplishment out there.
I was one of the posters who liked OP’s style. It’s not the antics per se, and no applicant will say to the adcoms, “Hey, I blew off my entire homework process grade because I knew I’d ace the test.” It’s the type of person who does those sorts of things, but can still be very successful.
I guess it’s just a gut feeling. Let’s just say I’ve seen a number of kids like that at the very highest levels of achievement, including at HYP, and beyond.
The tippy-top schools are actually quite interested in math competitions too. The premier high school contest is USAMO. About 250-300 kids per year qualify; each year the top 12 scorers are named winners, and the next 12 get honorable mentions.
I took a look at four years of winners from 2013 through 2016. (Most 2017 and 2018 winners are either still in high school or just graduated, so it’s tough to find information.)
Here are the stats for the winners, 48 named.
Number of unique winners (some students repeat): 36 (34 boys, 2 girls).
Colleges attended
MIT – 17
Harvard – 11
CMU – 2 (both are named Knaster-McWilliams scholars and one is also a Goldwater scholar, so full rides+)
Princeton – 1
Ohio State – 1 (student from Michigan; OSU is also home campus for the Ross number theory program and research)
Unknown – 1 (common name and I gave up looking)
Still in High School: 3
As I basically knew, USAMO winners are essentially auto-admit at any school that they would want to attend. In googling around, I often came across statements like this: “Now 17, he’s going to Harvard, but all the other Ivy League schools accepted him too, plus Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Chicago…” And he was only a winner in one year. Of course, it’s not the contest win that gets the kids in. The contest win is strong evidence of >+3.5SD sort of intelligence. There are very few kids that smart even at HYP, way less than 10% of the class. (That’s also why it’s trivial to predict that a high AIME score will, for instance, garner a very high SAT score, assuming even basic exposure to English - it doesn’t take too long to get fluent for those kinds of minds.)
I didn’t go through all the honorable mentions (48 of them named in those four years), but many of the names appear all over the recent Putnam lists, and seem to be at tippy top schools (MIT, Harvard, CMU, Princeton, and others). All USAMO qualifiers are in very high demand.
I also briefly chatted with an acquaintance who is very high up in the competition world (full professor with more than 20 years’ experience in this) who is also very interested in increasing access for girls in math (as all the schools are), and he said that simply qualifying USAMO is enough for girls to basically “go anywhere.”
Last, for people out there who listen to curmudgeons like Cathy O’Neill, who pooh-poohs contests as not being real math, a few of the 2013 winners are already pursuing research mathematics graduate programs at Princeton, Berkeley, MIT, etc. So, contests are not dead ends. You will often see bios like this if you dig around:
Hope that info helps some people out there! I have no idea why the kid up there applied to so many schools (he was also IMO Gold) - what a waste of time!! But then again, I doubt he spent much time on his essays, and as I wrote somewhere above I doubt that they were even read before admitting…
“Can be,” sure. But adcoms at places like Harvard (which OP initially named) don’t need to take risks on kids who don’t follow the usual, basic “rules.” This isn’t budding genius. It’s not creativity. It’s blowing off the basics.
I do like a little bending of rules, etc. But if that’s his purpose, don’t aim for Harvard. Maybe look at Hampshire. Harvard is going for proven stuff, kids who keep up. They’ve got 39000 lined up.
So OP, make wise choices. If you want to go your own way or chart your own path, do it with more significant challenges than blowing off homework or the SAT. Make a real difference.
Maybe, @SatchelSF , but each year, we see posts not unlike this one: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/1891200-asian-rejected-from-everywhere-postmortem-p1.html
^ Asian boy, right? (I don’t even have to read it.) And he won’t have been a winner or honorable mention. Demographics are incredibly important. No one should kid themselves that there aren’t entirely different standards for different demographics.
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@SatchelSF I can completely see how my posts paint me as some arrogant A-hole (emphasis on “A-”, haha) with a Steve-Jobs-type “edge”. It’s easy to imagine an arrogant dude flying through school by the seat of his pants and pssing off everyone around him with his horrible attitude. That would be a very, very risky edge and would probably only pay off in the corporate world once I’d already worked very high up the ranks. Luckily for myself and those around me, I keep my grade-clutching habits tucked behind an easygoing facade. I’m not a dck. People think I’m a pretty normal, jock-skater-rap guy, actually. I just enjoy making my classes more difficult by blowing off select busywork, rarely studying, and never taking notes (I’m still engaged during most classes, though). It’s a thrill and it eliminates the empty feeling that comes with having 40-60% of your grade determined by something your 10-year old sister could do with a little determination. Some of you are right though–part of it is probably some hidden ego issue. Thankfully, I’m an ultra-positive and happy person 99% of the time.
As far as college goes, I’m very unsure. I have a sinking feeling that Harvard would gleefully defer me if I applied early. I would really like to secure somewhere nice early and still have a chance to try my luck with a few others during the regular cycle. I can’t ask for much specific help in deciding where to apply early since I don’t want to reveal which academic area I dominate in. (By the way, I had a great time at the international competition–I felt right at home with the best in the world!) Thanks for all the advice you guys have given, by the way. Some of the discussions here are highlighting things that I will need to be very conscious of on my apps.