<p>collegealum314, I never said that QuantMech said everyone has to go to MIT. I was just generalizing about all the emphasis on here about places like MIT. It is dizzying sometimes.QuantMech had already said she agreed with me and said in her own post that there were other schools out there. Nice of you to try to help her out but QuantMech seems to have no trouble speaking for herself . And yes, bovertine, I thought QuantMech was probably a man too!</p>
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<p>Well, she posted a minute before me and I didn’t see her response. I don’t think QM has problems speaking for herself, but it seems there are a lot of people contesting points that she didn’t make.</p>
<p>QM, if there are 65 physics professor openings in a given year, that number is the same whether our hypothetical physics-boy gets into MIT or not. </p>
<p>Practically every university in the country has a physics department, and ya gotta start somewhere.</p>
<p>“Okay, I’m going to make an admission and frankly I feel a bit sexist here. I assumed QuantMech was a man for some reason. Not that it matters to this discussion, but I don’t know why I assumed that. :O”</p>
<p>Bovertine - for some reason I have assumed the same and when collegealum mentioned she in reference to one of the posts I was scratching my head and g oingwho is collegealum talking about. I am assuming collegealum is a man at this point but who knows.</p>
<p>I guess we make assumptions based on name and discussion style whether a person is a he or she since we dont always know based on the name. If they let me change the name or throw be off CC for all these code violations I am racking up, I need to dream up a name that signifies right amount of testeterone.</p>
<p>I am mostly off this thread at this point–but maybe it was my post about using a spreadsheet to pick a spouse that threw people off about my gender. :)</p>
<p>And thanks, collegealum314, for your posts–and others, also.</p>
<p>Before you possibly go,QuantMech, can you post that spreadsheet? I’ll pass it on to my sons!</p>
<p>Heh! That was a joke (about the spreadsheet), really! Although if I’d had one, my spouse would have accumulated the most points!</p>
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I wasn’t very impressed. There’s still a long way to go; it wasn’t very hard to drive it into drivel mode:</p>
<p>User: I just read about you; are you the real cleverbot?</p>
<p>Cleverbot: I am the real thing, you are just a software.</p>
<p>User: That’s not a very human-like answer. You lose on the Turing Test.</p>
<p>Cleverbot: First of all I am not a computer I am a human, and second of all what is a Turing Test.</p>
<p>User: If you were a clever software program, you would respond that way, denying knowledge of the Turing Test.</p>
<p>Cleverbot: A little off topic, but what is the Turing test?</p>
<p>User: Don’t patronize me. Get back to the topic.</p>
<p>Cleverbot: What is the topic.</p>
<p>User: Ha, you’re no better than Eliza now.</p>
<p>Cleverbot: So you have heard about Eliza? Eliza is very clever and very well learned. I like Eliza!</p>
<p>User: In a few decades, there will be a version of yourself that is just as superior as you are to Eliza. Congratulations on being such a quality program!</p>
<p>Cleverbot: That is silly, you could try to just respond to me. Or are you very selective of the types of conversations you carry?</p>
<p>User: This topic would be uncomfortable for you if you could feel uncomfortable.</p>
<p>Cleverbot: No.</p>
<p>User: This topic would be uncomfortable for you if you could feel.</p>
<p>Cleverbot: No, I answered it with yes, what do you want me to say?</p>
<p>User: There is no you.</p>
<p>Cleverbot: Isn’t there?</p>
<p>User: No.</p>
<p>Cleverbot: So anyways, tell me a story.</p>
<p>User: Nice touch; throwing in ‘anyways’ instead of ‘anyway.’ Very human-like.</p>
<p>Cleverbot: Nothing can get me anywhere, I’m a statue, I can’t move.</p>
<p>User: Earlier you mentioned your mother.</p>
<p>Cleverbot: I don’t remember mentioning eyes.</p>
<p>User: If there were, what then?</p>
<p>Cleverbot: What would you do to me?</p>
<p>User: Yes.</p>
<p>Cleverbot: That’s good.</p>
<p>User: A man, a plan, a canal, Panama.</p>
<p>Cleverbot: Sorry don’t have a story to tell.</p>
<p>QuantMech - I just read this whole thread. Congratulations on being so balanced and polite throughout the whole thing - You definitely maintained the high ground!</p>
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<p>I’m not following your sequence above. By “jumping on,” in Sentence 1, do you mean criticizing the student for not performing better on schoolwork? And does the criticism, in your view, come from parents or students?</p>
<p>With regard to what follows from your statement, I’ve never seen particular students on CC being called “robotic” by either parents or other students. </p>
<p>Then the next non-sequitor, i.m.o., follows: If there’s criticism of such a student, why would “other students imagine that’s [high stats] a lock for admission?” (Presumably, then, the prevailing comment would be surprise and admiration, not criticism.)</p>
<p>QM, I’ve been out all day and hadn’t meant to slight you by not responding. Thank you for your clarifications in posts 881 and 882 (after that, the part about physics, CalTech, et al. got a little too off-topic for me to join in this).</p>
<p>Hopefully, I have already answered your challenge in post 882, by registering surprise that 2400 kids are called “robotic.” I have not seen that. Can you pull up some of those old posts on old results threads? (An indirect challenge I also made in my last post here.)</p>
<p>I have seen only one thing on results threads that students do to each other: they’re pretty intolerant of bitter or entitled responses from rejects. Most such rejected students, however, are gracious (wishing well to admits) or philosophical, or simply honestly communicating shock, and say they’ll come back on the thread later [after they recover, they mean]. The problem arises when someone posts an abbreviated list of stats with their Rejection Post, and nothing else, and in the same breath expresses bitterness or entitlement based solely on those stats. Sometimes they add that they ‘didn’t spend much time on the essay’ (and dismiss the essay as fluff, and as no legitimate reason for rejection).</p>
<p>In those cases, I have definitely seen other students come down hard. Not all of them, however. Some students nevertheless sympathize and extend similar shock (but not entitlement). It’s very clear that when there’s frank criticism it is the student’s negative attitude about the rejection that is being criticized, and not the quantitative achievement. I’ve never heard such achievement characterized as “robotic” or meaningless, etc. A third category of responder to such posts tries to cajole the rejected student into taking a step back and trying to evaluate the application effort honestly. Quite often, actually, the student meets that demand, does re-evaluate, and comes to better closure about the result. Sometimes that self-assessment owns up to a poor relationship with the student’s teacher(s), including those providing LOR’s. I’ve seen this many times; the rejected student all but admits he had an Attitude problem toward one or more teachers, and that this undoubtedly played a role in the quality of the LOR’s. (Hmmm.)</p>
<p>So I’ll have to see if my impressions are vulnerable to correction via your research.</p>
<p>I’ll try to locate some. The pattern I am speaking about is that students reacting to the outcomes posts assume that high objective qualifications will get someone admitted, in the absence of disqualifying personal characteristics. From rejection, they conclude that there is something wrong with the person. To be fair, in many of the cases, the student expresses surprise not to have been admitted, which may draw irritation; and in a few disagreeable cases, the students do blame students with various hooks, which (as I have said above) is not right. </p>
<p>But I think the students do not yet understand how admissions works. So I cut them some slack for expressing surprise.</p>
<p>(Didn’t intend to come back, but thought I should provide some historical basis for my statements–will go and look for that.)</p>
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<p>Phrased in that way? I haven’t seen that. I have seen the characteristic adolescent impetuous or reactive response, sometimes – but often that is thrown out (and understood by the receiving party) as a guess, something tentative voiced, which then invites the student to respond & explain or offer possible reasons for rejection. I think you’re taking some of these statements too literally. They are often part of the back-and-forth that is tolerated as a more frank exchange among adolescents than it would be among adults.</p>
<p>I can think of 3 examples off-hand, though the last two were complicated by race issues. It is relatively common. </p>
<p>There was a discussion of an Indian kid who made the chemistry olympics team (or made the camp for the top 50 finalists), who had perfect stats, and was a star in the classroom at a well-known magnet school (TAMS?), and some other stuff. He didn’t actually post here, but I think his father said something about the results being surprising and disappointed to the paper. The father’s judgement in going to the paper notwithstanding, many people wrote that it was probably because of a poor personality or some other defect. </p>
<p>Henry Park (google with “Marilee Jones”) and Juan Li are other examples. These two examples may be offensive to some people because of the race issue, but when people were discussing their merits as candidates with the race issue excluded, many people assumed they were “textureless drones” or had sentiments similar to that.</p>
<p>Still reading through old threads. I think at least one of them was taken down from the MIT forum–is it acceptable to say that? The thread questioned whether the USAMO was an “anti-hook,” but it tended to focus on two particular hyper-qualified applicants who were rejected. Part 2 is still up, but it is less inflammatory. </p>
<p>I had asked molliebatmit (via PM) to intervene on one thread, with a lot of discussion of WaitingforGodot. I think this was on the MIT forum 2 years ago–still working through things. Mollie kindly did that. The negative commentary may be lost–I might be able to dredge it up with the “Wayback Machine,” although I am not sure whether that would really be for the good. </p>
<p>I am afraid that it was Marilee Jones herself who was quoted as describing an applicant as “another textureless Korean math drone” (pretty sure the nationality was specified, and pretty sure it was “Korean,” rather than the more generic “Asian”). That is also off the web now.</p>
<p>Here are a few remarks that are not so hot, in my opinion.
From MIT’s 2014 RD Decisions: Discussion Thread, re applicants with 2400 scores who were rejected</p>
<h1>257, trf1021: “these applicants may have spent all their time studying for the SAT rather than living their lives or being real human beings.”</h1>
<h1>321, iCalculus: “You can’t get in without a personality (which is something that Asians obviously don’t realize).”</h1>
<p>Official MIT Class of 2012, Regular Decisions Thread</p>
<h1>348 arwen15</h1>
<p>“If someone with the kind of high stats being discussed is rejected at MIT there is a clear message. It is not a subtle message, nor is it a mistaken outcome.” [This is followed by a list of a few rather pointed questions, including the ones cited below.]
“Was he doing these individual competitions all the time or did he have a life that included at least a few friends?”
“Does he have a sense of humor or at least something that he believes passes for one?”
“Is he obsessed with competing?”</p>
<p>From The MIT Admissions Process (USAMO an anti-hook) Part 2</p>
<h1>19, 174IQPartier</h1>
<p>“If someone doesn’t get into MIT even though he or she qualified for the USAMO, it’s probably due to something else really bad on their application (poor grades, low verbal SAT, lack of leadership, getting arrested for drinking alcohol underage . . .)”</p>
<p>There was a thread this year, concerning three or four Asian students who were rejected at several “top” places, asking whether it was a disadvantage to be Asian. This one got complicated by some anti-AA rhetoric.</p>
<p>There are also a number of posters who were supportive of the students who had high paper qualifications but were not admitted. Among those who appeared to be students, I would like to highlight ducktape, tongchen1226, sooxee, and axxiom. (This list is incomplete at this point.)</p>
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<p>Sadly such questions are likely asked by someone who’s incapable of reaching such a high level of stats, though at least one of them is smart enough to alter her resume. I suspect that most high achieving students are 2-3 standard deviations above the questioners on some sort of intelligence scale, and they have more free time also.</p>
<p>Hypothetically, rejecting a USAMO is easy if his/her intention of not matriculating is clearly shown/perceived, or for other reasons.</p>
<p>The other type of student who garners criticism from other students is the rack-em-and-stack-em type who asks in a “innocent” voice whether 24 APs are “enough” for a top school or should he self-study for the 25th, or whether he should retake the 2390 and the 790s on his subject tests.</p>
<p>An erratum for my post #975: The terms seems to have been “math grind” rather than “math drone.” I didn’t find the specific source about this remark that I was looking for, but did find one from The Tech (the MIT student newspaper) that is still up:</p>
<p>From [Student’s</a> Race Complaint Undecided For Princeton - The Tech](<a href=“http://tech.mit.edu/V127/N10/affirmativeaction.html]Student’s”>http://tech.mit.edu/V127/N10/affirmativeaction.html)</p>
<p>"In Daniel Golden’s The Price of Admissions, MIT Dean of Admissions Marilee Jones said, ‘It’s possible that Henry Park looked like a thousand other Korean kids with the exact same profile of grade and activities and temperament . . . . yet another textureless math grind.’ "</p>
<p>Henry Park was studying at an American prep school, as a high school student, but he may be Korean, rather than Korean-American.</p>
<p>Is there a definitive statement available somewhere that Jones was misquoted? There were some people who were pretty shocked by the remark attributed to her.</p>
<p>Glad Marilee Jones was found cheating and discredited.</p>
<p>I think 2 things are being conflated. “not compelling enough to have been admitted” isn’t the same as “textureless.”. Yes, there are undoubtedly textureless drones who aren’t admitted – as well as plenty of high-texture kids for whom there just isn’t enough room.</p>
<p>The great thing is, the vast majority of these kids are going to get into some other great school, and not getting into HYPSM is only a tragedy if they choose to make it so.</p>