1980 SAT got into Harvard. How awesome is this?

Applying to College
81

<p>You are not addressing the point that you keep pointing to SATs. Can you indicate any correlation between declining average SAT scores and academic performance at any Ivy League school? Because if colleges are indeed dipping low, the stats should be there. And you seem to be saying the high scores should be the primary, and "uniqueness and leadership and character" secondary. Why not the latter primary and the former secondary. I am not saying this should be the case, but I am curious as to what your answer will be. </p>

<p>I have read b4nnd20's posts. They are clear, but I do not find them to be correct.</p>

82

<p>derrick, I know of no study that correlates declining SAT with performance. They may be available at other colleges, other than Ivies. It would be difficult to do such a study, too many variables, and since there is grade inflation and dumbed down material the differences may not be significant. A 1980 may do as well at Harvard as a 2400 but that' s Harvard with grade inflation, etc. A 1980 will not get into Caltech because he/she will flunk out. That tells you right there that Caltech believes that low scoring students cannot handle the rigor. Other than Caltech there is not a single meritocratic institution in the US other than Juilliard.</p>

<p>As to your second question, why not reverse the weight? I too would like it. The world needs people with heart more than those with head. Those with a head and no heart have caused enough havoc. I prefer a Thoreau or Rilke to Edison or Graham Bell. But unfortunately it is easier to identify and nurture the latter. If we go for heart selection for every Gandhi we will get a million duds and a dozen Hitlers. if we went with the head, we will get half a million duds and one Einstein with compassion.</p>

83

<p>Well, since scores are flawed, how about we indicate intelligence on applications by making "Intelligence" an extended, specific area on teacher and counselor recommendations? By intelligence I don't mean GPA or work ethic, or IQ, I mean intellectual capability and demonstrated smarts that teachers can sense in the classroom.</p>

<p>I think this solves the problem of scores not telling the whole story. the flaws of standardized tests are keeping us from getting to the real point of the discussion. and that point of discussion is my (and ramaswami's) claim that intellectual strength should carry more weight than personality/character in admissions. so, let's address the real point of contention: which should be the more important criterion for admissions: intellect (as demonstrated by a combination of scores, extensive recommendations, personal essays, and perhaps sample assignments) or personality (as demonstrated by extracurriculars, community service, extensive recommendations, and personal essays)?</p>

<p>BTW, I am a she ;)</p>

84

<p>To answer the last question, I vote for intelligence.</p>

85

<p>b4nnd20, I like your thinking. Yes, teacher recs can speak eloquently to intellect. I vote for intelligence. Unfortunately, fierce intellectual passion and combat is no longer valued in schools, everyone has to be nice to each other. Teachers are threatened by bright kids.</p>

86

<p>Personally, I think intelligence should be paramount, but not an end all be all. Remember, intelligence is no more controllable than physical attractiveness. Also, I don't think that recommendations are really a solution, simply because the brightest students aren't necessarily the most likable students (necessarily!) and might not get the most accurate recommendations from a teacher. But your thinking is definitely a step in the right direction, b4nnd20.</p>

87

<p>Re Post 77.<br>
Excuse me, read <em>my</em> post. Why are you always telling other people to read your posts? You apparently are not as clear or unified in your message as you believe yourself to be, because more than one person is not receiving the message from you that you supposedly want received.</p>

<p>I'm still not understanding what your gripe is. That admissions is not perfect? That Trappist monasteries cannot select for character? (They actually do a fine job, once the candidate is admitted, of <em>training</em> for character, btw, & they tend to get the raw material fairly accurate, in that there's full disclosure beforehand, meaning a <em>highly</em> self-selected group, more so than to any Ivy.) You want a perfect world, sir, and you're not going to get it. Maybe you've been in your field too long.</p>

<p>Your son, according to your earlier post, got into <em>5</em> Ivies. How many cc'ers & their parents would die for one such acceptance. Apparently, we now learn, his 2 waitlists/rejections were for schools for which he initiated no interest: MIT and Princeton. So what exactly has he lost, and how supposedly has the evil world of college admissions harmed your accomplished son?</p>

<p>"What has happened to the Catholic Church" (re, priest abuse) is not related to the Trappists, where you will find much less degradation, perversion, etc. The monastic or contemplative life is for strong, healthy souls & minds only. Not unlike military service, one is weeded out later if not sooner, if one cannot hack it. Ain't a lot of cushie perks & distractions to fall back on when you're frustrated with prayer in the middle of the night, with no one to talk to. Kind of tests the mettle.</p>

<p>By contrast, the <em>active</em> priestly life was, in past decades (whose graduates are now middle-aged & elderly priests -- the group responsible for the vast majority of sexual abuse), not even vaguely self-selecting, and even less subject to examination & pre-selection by the institution itself. You were encouraged to join up, regardless of how unfit you may be, how "unqualified," how mentally unstable, how out of touch with your own sexuality. There is absolutely no parallel between diocesan recruitment of priests from the 1940's through the 1970's, and college admissions. None. Please do not speak about subjects of which have apparently little knowledge.</p>

88

<p>derrick, why are you focused on the controllable aspect. Intelligence is not controllable, yes, but that does not devalue it. You are right about teacher rec's flaws, the bright kids don't suck up. My S was described by his teachers as cocky, even arrogant but that's because he was far ahead of his teachers and didn't go to them for help, etc.</p>

89

<p>ramaswami, I will not argue the obvious avoidance on your part (as others already have) to present us with any kind of statistical, factual backing to your claim that SAT scores are a good sole predictor of intelligence and ability to excel in college and two, that high IQ somehow naturally would be correlated to leadership skill. Neither of these are true in the least.</p>

<p>However, as someone that got admitted to Yale on a 27 ACT, I just want to share this tidbit: I scored within the top 3% on the standardized college entrance test in my own country. Why the discrepancy? Simple: some of the criteria the one test looked for and judged by, was completely missing or even cause for a mark-down in the other - and vice versa. </p>

<p>Standardized test scores, beyond a certain level of basic skill, test for nothing more and nothing less than how well you can do (how well you've been prepared to do) on that particular test.</p>

90

<p>As for the "sucking up", some students have the social competence and open personality to actually like talking to and learning more from our teachers. And they like us back.</p>

91

<p>epiphany, when I said read my post, I was responding to your assumption that my S wanted MIT ,etc. If you read my post, he did not want MIT. Also, you perhaps misread, he wanted Princeton. But this is beside the point. Yes, he got into 5 Ivies, he is happy. But we still think the system is flawed.</p>

<p>My comments about the Trappists or the Church were casual comments to open a discussion re how difficult it is to identify character/leadership etc. Of course, staying in a monastic setting and observing the rules for 70 years as did Thomas a Kempis and others is not evidence of character, etc.</p>

<p>The evidence for Intelligence and leadership is so vast that I do not have the time and energy to pull it together. Those interested can do a search thru your university library. Same for SAT and intelligence testing. The literature is availabe in psych journals, search PsychInfo or Medlars.</p>

92

<p>I am not a person that devalues intelligence, just someone who is extremely wary of how much deference give in it's presence. </p>

<p>And there is a level of social maneuvering that students have to utilize in order to get a good recommendation, but that is also why recommendations might not be the best method of illustrating a student. An idiotic brown noser can be painted as a Homer, and an aloof genius can be painted as Homer Simpson. But recommendations obviously still have their own value.</p>

93

<p>frrph, yes some of you may have the social competence but often it is ingratiation. Another American shibboleth, social competence, emotional IQ, my god, this country has been hijacked by the touch feely crowd. Wait till you get your clock cleaned by the Indians and Chinese who, having been selected by test scores, will still show plenty of leadership and character. The graduates of the IITs own 30% of the start ups in Silicon Valley, that is leadership and they were all selected by scores. And many of them have given and given and given to their alma maters, their villages, their towns, their country of origin , endowed scholarships in this country, etc etc etc. A smart person will be smart enough to know what works and what doesn't which makes for leadership. A smart person will be smart enough to know that helping others and not engaging in fraud is actually more advantageous in the long run.</p>

<p>The reason why so many people oppose intelligence is so few are smart. HL Mencken rightly said you can never lose a wager underestimating the intelligence of the American people. Substitute any other country for American and you have it.</p>

94

<p>And yet my country of knuckle dragging numbskulls crafted the most perfect legal document and cornerstone in the world, is the world's only superpower survived over 200 years of strife and turmoil, and has never lowered it's brow to any nation, British or otherwise. </p>

<p>ramaswami, you value intelligence more than is healthy. A smart person can come up with an idea, but it takes a true genius to present that idea to the masses.</p>

95

<p>ramaswami, I think there is no alternative to the teacher rec in separating out the best students. I certainly had a few difficult teachers, but I was always very careful around them and didn't get penalized grade-wise. That carefulness comes from getting shafted in the school system very early on. An exceptionally smart person often has to go out of their way not to appear that they think they are better than the teacher, which is what I did. Any time I needed to correct the teacher in math or science question I would pose it as a question, "Why wouldn't it be like this?" or "I don't understand why you don't do this here" even when I was 95% sure that I was correct. Part of it was that I really didn't want to show up the teacher, and part of it comes from fear of retaliation. </p>

<p>Certainly, I think if colleges suspect that the teachers may have shafted a student they should ignore the rec, though. But if people are clamoring for social intelligence, then the teacher rec should be sufficient to ensure they at least have a little.</p>

96

<p>ok im leaving this thread now...ive pretty much emptied my brain of all opinion on this topic. and i admit, i am a bitter 2400. lol, i miss the days when that sort of thing mattered to people and i could boast ;)</p>

97

<p>Derrick, the founding fathers were much smarter than our current crop of politicians. We have plenty of smart Americans--they just aren't valued very highly.</p>

<p>No one is arguing that people who aren't smart don't have value--even professionally. However, I think it's more important to give more choices of where to go to school to those that are passionate about school. I'm fairly athletic, but I think if you are at olympic level you should get recruited by the most programs. Maybe you would flourish much more in one setting than another. Imagine if you run a 4.2 40 yd dash, bench 500 lbs, and are listed as one of the top 200 football recruits in the country. What if they valued a whole bunch of other criteria first, and as a result, you only have a choice of USC or schools that are out of the top 25? Great results, right? I mean, who cares, USC is in the top 5. But if that recruit isn't a good fit there, they might not flourish there. So they now have to choose between one school with national exposure, good placement in the NFL, and the prestige and pride of playing for a national power; and another smaller school with none of that that might be a better environment. Why should they have to make that choice? Let them choose among the top 5 schools for the best environment.</p>

<p>If you want to select for these other activities in terms of getting people for jobs, why not do it after college? Why not just take the class president of state University if that's what you want in a job applicant? Part of the problem is that the ivies project an image that they choose more for intelligence than they really do. This is the primary reason why people are disappointed with admissions.</p>

98

<p><em>Life</em> is flawed, ramaswami. The only way to be fully "fair", or allow for possible errors in testing, predictability, projections, is to admit the outliers as well as the probable successes. (One group may turn into the other.) There are not enough freshman seats to account for that, not at the elites. And, as I have said, people change. This is also life. My brother was a promising young brilliant student who snapped in his 20's. The Elite college which admitted him didn't "get it wrong" by virtue of the fact that fortune-telling & prophecy are inexact exercises. He was promising, period. The promise was laced with mental illness well hidden from sight, which eventually destroyed that promise. Should the U have "known" this? Are they to be blamed because my brother -- oozing with raw & polished intelligence, btw -- was accepted possibly "over" someone else? (I don't have his scores in front of me; I'm quite sure he did fine in that dept. His grades were fabulous; his educational foundation thorough, etc.)</p>

<p>It is not the length of time one stays in a monastery that is the test of character: it is the product, as assessed by reputation & by written communication, for example, with the outside world, which evidences what & how the pilgrim has learned within the monastery: the changes over time. No, it's not perfectly measurable. One goes by a collection of indices.</p>

<p>I repeat that I think you've been in your field too long. The tangents on this thread remind me somewhat of the earlier religion thread now deleted from the Parent Cafe. It featured some posters who insisted that whatever cannot be measured or seen is therefore nonexistent. It's very difficult to quantify & measure aspects such as leadership. Further, even buying your premise (which I don't entirely, but I'll indulge it temporarily), intelligence as a predictor of leadership does not also predict the direction, effectiveness, & ethics of that leadership. And to many U's, those latter qualities are essential to the category of leadership they seek. If a leader is leading corruptly, what value is that? If a leader is leading unwillingly, the leadership itself may be compromised. If a leader is at cross-purposes with his followers or the institution he or she represents, appointing or accepting him may be self-defeating. This is why human evaluation comes into play, when selecting for the category of leadership sought. Oh, whoops, sorry: there comes that flawed humanity again; can't have <em>that</em>!</p>

<p>Ex-president Jimmy Carter has been far more effective as a leader away from the presidency than in it. Like Bill Clinton, Carter has a very high IQ. Yet Bill Clinton was a far more effective <em>presidential</em> leader than Carter, which is admitted even by Clinton's staunchest enemies. Just one of the many limitations of relying on intelligence to predict effective leadership. You have to want to lead, as well as having the potential to. The desire to lead (not just the ability) is what U's are looking for more than a data point.</p>

99

<p>
[quote]
frrph, yes some of you may have the social competence but often it is ingratiation.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Some of "us"? Us lowly non-high-scoring individuals that've been able to hold our own ground in debates with teachers, that've had as many arguments as we've fostered friendships with these same instructors, that've had the audacity to believe people our seniors DO have valuable lessons to impart. </p>

<p>I've never sucked up to anyone - my professors value my opinion and friendship because I don't carry myself with the arrogance and entitlement you exude.</p>

<p>
[quote]
Another American shibboleth, social competence, emotional IQ, my god, this country has been hijacked by the touch feely crowd.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Funny you assume I am American. I am not. And I think what you erroneously label mere "touchy-feely" sentimentality is part of the realization reached at institutions of higher learning that academia has long been an in-bred, intellectually handicapped place by narrow-mindedly allowing intelligence to be defined by the same factors that traditionally have gotten only the privileged in, in order to perpetuate the sheltered bubble of the elite. Colleges have become more aware of how the system works against non-elite kids with talents, and are trying to - if not change it - compensate for it.</p>

<p>And you never responded to the obvious fact I posed you: standardized tests vary in format, criteria, expectations of what you actually COME IN WITH. If a student never had the opportunity to take an algebra class, will the score alone objectively reflect on his intelligence?</p>

<p>
[quote]
Wait till you get your clock cleaned by the Indians and Chinese who, having been selected by test scores, will still show plenty of leadership and character.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>I don't need my "clock cleaned", thank you very much. I held serious leadership positions at 14, and got myself to this country and into college single-handedly when I was 18. But thank you for arrogant assumptions, as always.</p>

<p>
[quote]
A smart person will be smart enough to know what works and what doesn't which makes for leadership.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Someone with a high IQ in mathematics will NOT necessarily know how to best run an organization, how to socially network, how to take initiative. Again, all you offer us is unsubstantiated, lofty generalizations. I know how a differential equation works, therefore I will know how to run a business, NGO, country? What kind of ridiculously oversimplified assertion is that? For someone with 30 years of academia behind you, you certainly don't pose very convincing lines of reasoning.</p>

<p>
[quote]
A smart person will be smart enough to know that helping others and not engaging in fraud is actually more advantageous in the long run.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Then you've already contradicted your own claim of how simple "intelligence" - being smart - is to define. Unless you are claiming hyper-intelligent people that do the most morally abhorrent things don't exist. Which, obviously, is an argument you would lose as easily as your SAT=IQ one.</p>

<p>
[quote]
The reason why so many people oppose intelligence is so few are smart.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>I do not oppose intelligance, and in fact, I don't think anyone else here does, either. What I do oppose is your oversimplified, narrow-minded, and arrogant definition of what it is and in what ways it can be measured and recognized.</p>

100

<p>The leaders of our society are NOT the ones with the highest IQ's. Fortune 500 CEO's probably have high intelligence, but you could certainly find a group with a much higher average. Look at any segment of our society and the highest achievers are not our 'most intelligent', the more intelligent of us are more likely to succeed, but it is far from any certainty.</p>

<p>The separation comes in the fact that many people are more socially adept or whatever other plan you want to take.</p>

<p>And that is to completely ignore your racial comments ramaswami, which I find many flaws with but that would be a giant, controversial, and completely tangent conversation.</p>

<p>Perhaps your son was more intelligent than his teachers, I would however assume that the vast majority of them had a greater knowledge within the subject. Until high school I personally combatted my teachers, as I was bored beyond belief and felt that the teachers had the intelligence of toast. As I was exposed to more specialized classes, I no longer quarrelled with my teachers, partially due to acceptance of social norms for progress, and also with the realization that intelligence pales in comparison to knowledge. Intelligence is only benificial in a novel situation, knowledge wins in nearly any competition of skill. And the fact that those with the most knowledge usually have a fair bit of intelligence makes that even more true. So learning is fully possible and neccesary whether or not you are 'smarter' than your teachers, if you can't see that, you clearly are not more intelligent than these teachers or anyone else.</p>

<p>Back to the original point - after a certain point(approximately the 650/1300/1950 line to me), you clearly have some intelligence, drive and other characteristics become very important and drastically outweigh the intelligence factor. If you start with the top 10%, you have enough in your head to propell you as far as you want(not to say you can't make it from any point, but excellence in some other area will likely be needed, be it athletic, effort based, or anything else).</p>

<p>BTW - I'm not saying that the 1 in 100,000 2400 is equal to the 1 in 10 1950, but only that success is likely for both groups. If I were an admissions counselor, I would rarely accept the people like ramaswami, who seem to look down on the general public, because that is likely to limit success. For engineering or other fields where contact with the public is rarer, those reservations would be less severe. And I would be likely to accept the 2000 that showed leadership throughout their high school career.</p>

<p>And before you overlook me as some dullard there ramaswami - 35 ACT (no SAT though, I'm a silly midwesterner).</p>