Stanford vs Yale

bluedevilmike
Sun, 10 Apr 2011 22:40:39 +0000

Yes, both of those are true.

The most important reason, however, is that only a committee provides year-to-year consistency. That does two things. (1) It helps adcoms know what they’re saying is reliable, and (2) it provides accountability.

For example, when my advisor (well-known, longstanding) tells adcoms that the professor who gave Mike Lee a C is really, really difficult – with a longstanding committee, they know what she means when she says he’s REALLY hard. They know what she means when she says that Mike is pretty bright despite the C. They know exactly what she means because they’ve read hundreds of her letters, admitted dozens of her students, and they know what they’re getting from her. They can trust her evaluation. She writes them 300 evaluations a year and they know exactly what she means when she says something.

Without a committee, how often do they get a letter from the same person so that they can calibrate? Once a year? Once every other year? Even just a few a year isn’t nearly the same scale as compared to one advisor writing every letter to every school.



The second reason is that candidates and even individual professors can simply lie. A committee can’t do that.

NCG once pointed out that a huge proportion of students promise multiple schools that they will attend if admitted. That presents a credibility problem, obviously, and medical schools can’t take those students at face value.

When the time came for me to play the waitlist game, however, I simply called up my advisor and I told her what my top choice was. She relayed that information to them, and bang – simple as that, I was admitted.

That’s not the sort of thing you can do without a centralized committee. The school knows my advisor can’t lie to them because they’ll simply punish her the next year. They don’t have any such assurances with individual students or even individual professors or even one-of-fifteen Harvard advisors.



So those are the two most important functions of the committee: consistency in evaluations, plus trustworthiness. You simply can’t replace that.