Something about college admissions isn't adding up...

Applying to College
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Something about college admissions isn’t adding up… Bare with my logic for a moment. Almost all brand-name college are private institutions. Like all private institutions, their absolute only concern whatsoever is gain. Thus, every action they take must be for that purpose, profit. So, it can logically be inferred that they accept people for ‘personal’ gain.

They accept a bunch of people to appear diverse, effectively nullifying any accusations of racism or things like that. They accept a bunch of people because the college thinks that they’ll be important people in the future and they want their school’s name on that guy’s (or gal’s) wikipedia page. And so on.

The admission’s process attempts to essentially predict success when the applicant isn’t beneficial for the college as a under-represented minority, legacy, athlete or donor.

That’s why it seems that they place so much weight on extra-curricular actives. When you look at very successful people, not all have perfect grades (but generally they do) but almost all have significant achievements that show that the person can both achieve IRL and has enough passion work hard on something that they’re passionate about.

School transcripts function as indicators of how much discipline they have over a long period of time. I don’t really see it how much they ‘know’. That could simply be done with subject SATs. They simply want to see how you were over time.

Essays and interviews change you from numbers to an actual person. My cousin for instance has great scores and great extra-curricular activities (notable a ~1800 FIDE) but IRL he’s a huge c…t. 5 minutes around him makes you want to hang yourself. No, I’m not being mean: when your talking to him he randomly says “I can read you like a book” and asks people if they want things signed because he’ll be the next Heisenberg and his signature will be valuable. He applied to about 10 colleges but he got rejected from all except his safe-school. Despite having SATs over ~2200 and a ~3.9 GPA, he only go accepted at a school with an admissions rate of ~35%. Why? Because colleges know that a douchebag can’t be successful since he’ll end up pissing off his superiors and he won’t get anywhere.

So, why are SAT “Reasoning” Tests and ACTs so important? They mean nothing in reality. They claim that they measure college readiness but we all know that’s bs. It measures how much you’ve studied for it. The reason that people who score higher on it do better in college because the more you study for something that’s supposedly important for college admissions, the more college matters to you. If universities said that a puppet technique test is important for admissions, the people who scored higher on it will probably do better in college.

These tests do measure how you can handle pressure very well, and that doesn’t judge a person’s future success all that much. but they obviously don’t measure “reasoning” at all. Personally, I got my SAT score up from ~1800 to ~2300 within like a month of studying for the test. A 1800 is seen as disastrous but a 2300 is seen as awesome. It makes no sense for colleges to place 30% of the focus of admissions (they do according to prepscholar) for something this arbitrary. If I had to give it a percentage, I’d say it’s value might be about 5% logically. BUT 30 F…KING PERCENT??? I see the trends of higher admissions rates for people with higher SAT scores simply as a conflation correlation and causation. The general trend is that the guy that got 1600 and applied to Princeton probably didn’t do anything spectacular with their 4 years but the guy that stayed up every other night putting in the effort for a 2300 probably did. But regardless, if the guy with a 1600 had everything the 2300 guy did, they the only downside of their score is that it shows that they can’t handle stress very well, and nothing more.

It just doesn’t make sense for literally some of the smartest people on the planet to give that much credit to something this obviously arbitrary. 30% seems insane.

Does anyone agree with me? Is prepscholar simply making up sh.t because they make money off of id…ts who think that a 2400 will get them into Yale even if they didn’t do anything for their high school career?

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A 2400 will not get a person into any highly selective university, because as you said, it does not accurately reflect the academic ability of an applicant and highly selective colleges don’t want test-taking robots.
You can’t really quantify how much the SAT counts in terms of admissions as the process is holistic so saying it’s worth 30% isn’t very accurate. It’s not like there’s a score sheet in which adcoms give applicants points based on their application and then pick the 1500 highest scorers.
For extremely selective schools, I think GPA/SAT is one hurdle which most people get past, so if your app has nothing extraordinary and your stats are very low then you are rejected. Then EC’s/Essays/Recs/Hooks are looked at and that is the main part in determining who gets in and who doesn’t as there are simply too many people with 4.0/2300+ to accept all of them.

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So if elite universities are placing the wrong amount of weight on the SAT or ACT, what should they do instead?

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@rdeng2614 I’m not arguing that it doesn’t mean much because everybody who applies to highly selective university has high SAT, but simply that it doesn’t matter AT ALL. As you said, they look at everything holistically but it just doesn’t make sense for adcoms to look at an application of a great candidate and say “well, he looked like we were going to admit him but too bad he got a 1200/2400”. It simply doesn’t make any sense at all. The only things that tests like these can actually measure are how people can handle themselves under stress and how much effort they put into something arbitrary to achieve something bigger. Both properties obviously contribute to a person’s success but not by that much. It doesn’t seem more valuable than a peer recommendation when predicting success yet it’s regarded as probably the second most important factor for getting accepted…

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@CheddarcheeseMN I’m not saying that they’re placing the wrong about of weight. What I’m saying is that they don’t actually put as much weight on it as people make it seem to be. If I had to decide, I’d see how much resources the individual had on hand and how much he or she had real-world success relatively. For instance, if a inner-city kid with a family income of $20,000 started making tutorials on the internet on how to make cool projects out of useless parts, he’d probably also apply that creativity if he’s at MIT and beyond to make the school proud. If I saw that another kid from a wealthy family started his own interior design firm and ran it adequately instead of blowing the money on a car, I’d imagine that he’d only grow more and eventually become a well-known business figure if he attends Wharton. Basically, what it seems that colleges are doing right now. Again, I’m not arguing that colleges are doing it wrong, it’s just that people seem to have a very illogical view of how colleges judge applicants.

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Your logic is wrong because your premises are faulty:

One may believe these premises, but they are very, very open to debate. I, for one, disagree with them; the selective private colleges are non-profit and they have many “virtuous” aims both explicit and implicit.

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However, non-profit organizations need to avoid making negative profit in order to avoid going out of business. No college wants to follow Antioch, Daniel Webster, or Sweet Briar into financial trouble.

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@marvin100 Sorry for not being clear enough. I don’t mean profit in the sense of money and property. I can’t think of a single decent for-profit college. I simply mean they want to rise the status of the college and accept people accordingly. They accept some people so their diversity numbers look good, they accept others because their athletic ability is beneficial to the college. Some others are accepted because their wealth and family status is appealing to the college (i.e. George Bush, most probably Obama’s daughters), some other get in because of legacy to contributes the school’s community sense. Finally, some get in because they are predicted to be very successful in the future. SAT scores cannot logically account for 30% of any admissions decision. Or even near that ball-park.