So does this mean legacy students are automatically assumed to have a better personality?
Thatâs a strange one, as Yale already had the recommendation letters when they sent out the likely letter. And at least for the year I know well, not everyone with the award who had applied to Yale RD got a likely letter. Only most of them.
And by the way, I agree with not admitting selfish jerks. I found MIT is particularly good at screening those kids out.
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My only contribution to this thread is to say that @NiceUnparticularMan 's thoughtful posts are so much appreciated by me. I donât have the patience â or clarity of mind â to add to the discussion, but man am I enjoying his posts!
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I wonder how those advocating stack/rank âpureâ academic merit-based admissions would feel about this.
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OTOH, weâve seen one get into Stanford 
Gotta love those anecdotes.
So it is not that this never helps, it is just a question of percentages.
To use the Harvard framework, suppose you currently have a 2 for academics, 2 for activities/athletics, and a 3 (generally positive) for personal. Absent a hook, this sort of combination was unlikely to get you admitted.
Now, being a recruited athlete would get you a 1 in activities/athletics. So that was one way past this problem.
And there were also 1s in either academics or activities. Now, interestingly, that was not enough on its own. About 30% of academic 1s got rejected, about 50% of activities 1s got rejected. These appear to mostly be cases where the applicant got a 1/3/3 sort of combination (or worse).
Still, if you had a 1/2/3, or a 2/1/3, then you were in good shape. And those were the spiked people.
But if you had a 2/2/2, you were also in good shape.
OK, so which path was more common? Well, you have to do some math and make some inferences and so forth, but it looked to me like the 2/2/2 path was somewhere around 10 times more common than the combination of the other two paths. Meaning many more people in the unhooked Harvard admit pool got there by getting a Personal 2 to go along with their other 2s, relatively few (aside from recruited athletes) got in with a 1 in something and a Personal 3.
So thatâs the data.
Anecdotally, I see a lot of people pointing to cases of claimed academic or activity spikes and saying that is why they got in. We have an immediate problem that if we canât see their personal score, we donât know they didnât get a personal 2, which would be an alternative explanation. And we know that Harvard was very stingy with the 1s (indeed, there were cases in the litigation record where one reviewer wanted to give a 1, and another reviewer downgraded it to a 2+ because it wasnât unique enough).
Still, overall there were something like 600 people in this study who got either an academic 1 or an activity 1 who got admitted. And that is a lot of possible anecdotes.
But 7687 got in with a personal 2. Even knowing some of those would have been hooked, it is still a way, way bigger number. And if they had that personal 2, and the academic and activities 2s as well, they didnât need a 1. Which is good, because only a few did.
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So one of the criticism in the study we are discussing is that legacies had, on average, higher personal scores, controlling for other factors that could be measured.
The question is whether that was because of bias, or because of factors that could not be measured, or a combination of both.
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To turn one of your oft repeated questions back to you - should schools not at least try to screen for âniceâ in an effort to weed out the jerks? Even if the jerk is the #1 student in some discipline(s)?
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It was a comment on the model but it does show how different buckets can be weighted by different factors for admissions.
No. They should not. College admissions should not be about judging the character. How dare they appoint themselves to be such judges, and what are they communicating to rejected students? That they are not merely not sufficiently academically competitive - but that they are in fact not good enough people?
In fact, as is widely known, the whole judging the character thing didnât enter the Harvardâs process until they started having the Jewish problem a century ago. I guess until then they were fine with jerks, if they were their kind of jerks.
Until then, they were just fine relying on entrance exams. As are to this day most other elite universities all over the world.
And if your tests (like ACT/SAT) canât tell the difference between merely bright and truly exceptional, you just need better tests.
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Iâve been pointing this out across threads for a long time. People get all wound up about various preferences and demand a system that is neither achievable the way American society is organized or desired by the majority of American society (before people get too worked up survey results vary significantly depending on how the questions are framed and asked).
But the bottom line for all of this is applicant numbers. They are highly rejective because of the number of qualified applicants. Eliminate all preferences and double the size of Harvardâs incoming class and it is still single digit admit. âDear Sallyâ still isnât getting in.
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Then we simply disagree.
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And to be clear, Harvard denied any strict weighting of underlying ratings, and the data backed them upâthe overall rating is what actually mattered, and the underlying ratings did not completely explain the overall ratings. Which again critics said was yet another place bias could creep in.
My point was really just to illustrate how relatively minor changes in selectivity by factor could handle increasing application volumes. Reweighting is not required, although of course they could if they wanted to. I just am unaware of any evidence that they have reweighted in any meaningful way.
If your goal and mission is to develop societal leaders you would be grossly negligent if you werenât trying to judge character of those you are about to train.
Their goals and your desires regarding what their goals should be arenât aligned but within their stated goals character is key. How successful they are at this is subject to wide discussion and debate but I donât think that the premise is given their stated goals.
And just like that you are back to advocating for something that the schools in question are not interested in using as their sole admit criteria. They are very clear about that via the mission statements and âwhat we look forâ documents which you so disdain.
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The most charitable interpretation is they are trying to communicate to all HS kids that social, emotional, and physical development is as important as the endless pursuit of more gold stars.
And again, you can focus on the kid who tried so hard and got so many gold stars, but who doesnât get admitted, and be rightly sympathetic.
But at least some of us can also focus on the very smart kid who explored interests and helped others and led activities and was a great friend, but who doesnât get admitted, and be rightly sympathetic.
The problem is lots of great kids are not going to be admitted. It is inevitable due to the math.
And if you donât think about all the different sorts of ways kids can be great kids, it is going to be hard to understand why the one sort of great kid you personally sympathize with the most isnât getting everything they might want.
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And how has this been working out so far, empirically?
Is there any research showing they have been successful judges of character of the future societal leaders they produce?
They are also apparently not interested in removing legacy preferences - also something I am advocating.
Are we only allowed to advocate for changes that the institutions are already interested in? Thatâs called lobbying - not advocating.
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Because the âunhookedâ (i.e. the unwashed masses of very bright students) make up the vast majority of applicants, even if you remove all preferences you will still be left with an enormous pool and few spots. There is no way around that math.
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And what the admissions committees, in effect, are telling them, is that they looked deep into their souls, and found them wanting as human beings.
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Youâve just captured yet another reason why for me, studies like this one simply break down. Separate from the question I raised earlier about using admits/not-admits from the wait list as the primary study and control groups because they are assumed to be âequally strongâ, the reality is that not everything about the admissions process, and specifically the adcom discussions, is captured by the data analyzed. I understand that some commenters here want everything to be about the (academic) data. But people are not a simple collection of data points to be measured and compared. And even if they were, how do you compare them?
I also question the value judgement of the âoutcomesâ chosen for measure in these discussionsâŠGPA? Career earnings? Of course they matter, but, theyâre reductive at best, and are in many ways wide of the mark IMO. I want much more for my kids out of their college experiences and educations than a 4.0 and a zillion dollar earnings profile.
And even within the stack/rank gold star modelâŠhow do you compare? How do you determine a choice between the math god and the writing savant? Youâre just then back to some attempt to define merit. Even within a constraint of academic merit there is no approach that all would find acceptable. So youâre back to, wait for it, a judgement call.
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If have a pool of 60,000 kids and can only take 2,000 you are not telling the other 58,000 kids that you âfound them wanting as human beingsâ. That is wrong on so many levels.
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