@xiggi By “No” I guess you are admitting that the theory of merit based admission producing only inarticulate and uncultured nerds simply doesn’t hold water, as we can see from the examples in the UK and rest of Europe, unless you’re saying Tony Blair and David Cameron are not as articulate or cultured as Richard Sherman.
I have no idea what you mean by Asia lottery admissions, I’m afraid you lost me on that one. Certainly English proficiency has to be a major factor in admission to US universities, especially for non-STEM majors. But that’s not what holistic admission is about. International students make up only 10% of Ivy League admits. As it’s implemented holistic admission is mostly used to weed out unhooked middle class White and Asian-American applicants to make room for one of the favored demographics, i.e. a social engineering scheme.
The test that you linked to looks like part of an entrance exam to Indian universities, focusing on Chemistry, Math and Physics. I’m sure that is not the entire exam, I’m sure they also test other subjects such as English, history etc. If you just look at our SAT II and AP tests, they are all pretty narrowly focused too. Not sure what your point is. I asked you what you think the purpose of college is and I didn’t get an answer from you.
I also think too much time and energy are wasted on meaningless ECs when many of these kids could’ve used the time to focus on studying, especially on time/energy consuming subjects such as math and science. 55% of our college grads are either unemployed or underemployed while those inarticulate, uncultured kids from Eastern Europe and Asia who excel in math and science in high school are eating our lunch, excelling in STEM subjects in our state colleges and taking many of the high paying IT jobs after graduation, while our well-rounded, articulate, cultured, athletic grads are making minimum wage folding t-shirts, pouring lattes and answering phones.
As far as the Ivy League training “leaders”, after the last 2 disastrous presidencies, I’ll have to say thanks but no thanks to these Ivy trained “leaders”. As far as I’m concerned Bush and Obama are Exhibit A and B of the failure of holistic admissions.