I can share what happened with the strongest math kid in our high school, who was the winner of multiple national awards. He was also known as “the obnoxious kid” who, among other things, went around saying that “MIT is my safety”.
Well, he didn’t get into MIT. Or any of other other top-10 colleges he applied to. However, he did get into CMU CS which itself has a very low admission rate. Not speculating what that means about the schools that rejected him, or finally accepted him.
AP is rather common, though it being more a la carte probably helps in this respect.
But standardization of K-12 courses and curricula is a hard sell in the US generally.
Giving preference to children of employees is widespread practice, and nobody cares except in college admissions. Children of teachers in good school districts or private schools are allowed to attend even if not otherwise eligible. People routinely put their thumb on the scale when they advocate for their children to get an internship or a job. Why is this not acceptable for college professors, provided their children can do the work? And, as with legacies, children of professors are usually more qualified academically than other admits
We are back to square one and the desire by some to believe that Harvard, HYPSM, T20+, etc. only care or should only care about academics in their admissions process. Academics is only one part, an important part but just one. You can keep going back there but the result isn’t going to change.
Harvard themselves will tell you “what we look for” and it is not pure academic prowess. They want smart, they want brilliant, they are not necessarily looking for the smartest or the most brilliant. Once someone crosses the very high base bar the “extra” isn’t a huge driver for them.
Winning a prestigious academic prize shows focus and hard work and dedication. It is those characteristics which the win signified and which likely got the extra credit for an applicant.
Being a starter on an all-state athletic team shows the same characteristics. And, it may even be harder due to needing to spend hours training one’s body prior to being able to train the skill. Top it off with crossing that 95% academic bar and person number two is arguably more of an outlier than person number one.
The applicant who didn’t just start a non-profit, but started and scaled a non-profit to serve 10’s of thousands, across multiple chapters but more importantly built something that will continue and thrive once they move on is amazing, demonstrating the same characteristics of focus, dedication, hard work and impact. If they cross that high academic base bar they are truly amazing and more than worthy of admission.
Number two and number three aren’t necessarily identified in a stack rank of academics but Harvard wants them just as much as number one because they fit their institutional goals and and mission of training people who can impact society.
Someone mentioned Rich Clark’s blog…everyone would benefit from reading it and taking it to heart.
I’m not gunshy about answering.
Assuming that the test is well-calibrated, and that a point’s difference in math is about the same as in verbal, then for a broad-based university (Harvard) and an applicant applying to a broad program (unspecified major in the college), I’d pick the somewhat higher and more balanced average score (799/799).
For a more specifically STEM focused program (MIT or CalTech or CMU or maybe Harvard Engineering), I’d go for the pointier kid with the higher math score.
I’d probably have a rough ratio to calibrate the scores (2Xmath + V) for MIT, (1XMath + 1XV) for Harvard College. Possibly a slight overweight on the verbal in the latter case - would need to look at typical distribution of majors/classes for Harvard College, and fine points of the testing regime.
Actually, and you may find this funny, but it does, of all places, on MIT’s CDS. 
It’s good to know, I guess, that my older son was judged by the invisible troika to be a person of good moral character, beyond his other, apparently less important than very important, qualities.
I can only hope that his younger brother (who makes him look like a dunce ;), is not judged to be lacking as a human being.
Almost makes me wish MIT did in fact do legacy. Almost.
Any idea can be reduced to absurdity. But it’s even easier to do with many other ideas.
Like legacy preferences.
In fact, it’s already been done.
If Harvard was truly capable of providing a transformative “liberal arts and sciences education” they could take the HS prodigy from the middle class family from Peoaria, IL and turn them into one of the future citizen-leaders. Now that would be a truly valuable mission.
I agree and precisely why I see it as interesting as these types of discussions move forward.
Allowing a K-12 kid to attend a public they wouldn’t otherwise be in the district for or a private is more of a financial inducement than admissions favoritism. And Harvard, etc. are, in theory, not supposed to be selling off admissions slots cheaply. Perhaps for the proverbial $5M donation, the public will look the other way ($5M funds a lot of scholarships). But moving the daughter of the German professor from the back of the waitlist to “admit” status (with, I think, big tuition breaks, as well), is another category.
As for nepotism in hiring - it exists, sure, but:
The hiring practices of Joe’s Auto Body shop are not subject to public concern to the degree that Harvard and the Ivy+'s admissions are.
Arguably, a lot of such nepotism is actually value-additive for the businesses concerned. When Joe decides to hire the son of his best mechanic, Tim on, he’s rewarding Tim, and the new hire is likely to be versed in the business, sheparded along by Tim, and probably on his best behavior to avoid embarrassing his dad. In fact, in low trust societies, a large share of businesses are family businesses, for reasons of trust and probably facilitating investment in the next generation by the previous generation. If you hire your son for your business and carefully train him for 5 years, you’re not so worried about him taking the training investment to a competitor.
Isn’t that why so many students (and their parents) around the world aspire to attend Harvard? They have all drunk the Kool Aid.
Perhaps instead this student should have been admitted to Harvard where they would have benefited from the “transformative power” of a Harvard education to turn them into a compassionate, kind, and considerate future citizen leader.
Thank you for doing so. My response would be the same regardless of which you picked for either type of school, which is simply to highlight that a judgement was made in the decision, which of course is by definition subjective. And the point stands even if I’d posed the two candidates as 800/798 and 799/799. Exactly the same total points. Exactly the same average. Some judgement is being brought to bear. It may relate to the mission or structure of the organization, or it may not. But it’s being made either way, at the institutional level or at the applicant level.
“The idea” was yours, and it was to make the test difficult enough to distinguish among applicants as needed. The fact, and point, is that even measurement systems that are purely and solely academic in nature, and entirely quantifiable, will ultimately result in subjective judgements in order to rank among similar yet different outcomes. Again, as similar as 800/798 vs 799/799. Those are different. Pick one.
It’s pretty clear why you refuse to do so.
A friend of mine worked in mit admissions and told me although they don’t count legacy, having a sibling that attends(ed) is a point in your favor.
The first is more problematic than the second. In your K-12 example people inside the district are paying to educate an outside student. Harvard is a private organization and their compensation practices should be up to them alone. If that German professor is that impactful to the school they would be fools not too accommodate the request for admission of the child. It is a small price for the wider benefit to the school community.
There are lots of other traits that matter, but they’re really hard to measure, and I don’t think the current version of Ivy+ holistic review is particularly capable of capturing them, at least, not with the precision that many think. But academic ability and achievement at age 17 can be measured (better than the other stuff), and the measurement could likely improve further, if Ivy+ colleges cared much. Instead, they’re mostly moving the opposite direction by de-emphasizing standardized tests.
Academic prizes - yeah, I’m reasonably gung-ho for this. Though would note that it’s really hard to compete for such stuff when not in a supportive school environment. The kid for rural Nebraska doesn’t even KNOW about half the high-end math competitions, and doesn’t have means to prepare and compete at the highest level. But he DOES know about the ACT/SAT, and likely AP tests as well…
Starter on an athletic team? Sure, that’s a nice checkbox. But Harvard doesn’t give you many brownie points for the fact that you went out for Volleyball for 4 years, (1 Freshman, 1 JV, 2 Varsity). Rather, they give you brownie points (LOTS of them) if you’re good enough to play for Harvard. So, it’s not really measuring effort and dedication at athletics, but rather, achievement. That’s fine for the Volleyball coach at Harvard - it gets him good players. But perhaps that’s not best for finding the best class of STUDENTS at Harvard.
Starting a non-profit? Puhleeeeezzzzzzzzz… But yeah, THIS one will be durable and save millions of whales, decades into the future. It’s not just mummy helping you set up a web page and getting her friends to give you money.
Anyone remember that scandal a couple of years ago where a bunch of incoming Harvard freshmen had their admission offers revoked due to some nasty postings on a private forum? Were their initial admissions based on strong personality scores or hooks?
The idea was a bit different.
The idea was not to create a test that strictly orders all applicants (not that it would be hard to create such a test by simply adding up the weighted score components if that was the goal), but to create a test that doesn’t indicate that there are tens of thousands of equally academically qualified students and leaves admission committees nothing better than to start picking apart their eternal souls.
And it’s not really my idea.
ACT/SAT are notoriously easy tests by the global standards of excellence. They can’t tell the difference between top 1% and top 0.01%. There are many other tests in the world that can. A typical American “average excellent” student would cry (and not the tears of joy) if she saw some of them.
Don’t just take my word for it. Here’s a great interview from a dozen years ago with Professor Bill Schmidt of the Institute for Research on Mathematics and Science Education:
“One international study of 12th-graders found that for those students in mathematics who were at the highest level – the kids who take calculus, AP calculus or regular college-level calculus – essentially came near the bottom of the international distribution against their peers. In science and physics, we were dead last. So even those students who we think of as our absolute best are not competitive internationally.”
And yes, again, I know there will be protestations that all those near-perfect ACT kids can “do the work” at America’s most elite academic institutions. But to me that simply means that they aren’t being challenged enough.
That’s what the most academically elite institutions in the world would do anyway. But it’s been amply explained to me that some finishing schools for aristocracy can, and must have different priorities.
I honestly don’t disagree. It triggers the gag reflex.
Yes, at a high level, you can see so many high schools offering so many advanced/honors classes as AP classes as a sort of back door into adopting a more standardized curriculum/testing scheme that may help them communicate course rigor in a highly competitive college landscape.
However, one problem with this is that the AP system is generally regarded as less advanced than things like A-Levels or IB HLs. Which makes them less meaningful to highly-selective colleges. Indeed, less meaningful than advanced classes at high schools those colleges know well.
So, students are de facto substituting quantity for quality. But I get the sense that doesn’t really work with the highly-selective colleges.
But this is precisely the point. Once you’re weighting, you’re bringing subjectivity into it. Even if the weightings are equal amongst disciplines tested, it’s a subjective decision to treat them as such.
Regardless, I disagree with the notion that this is not in fact your idea. When you say the idea is “to create a test that doesn’t indicate that there are tens of thousands of equally academically qualified students” you’re simply saying there are “too many.” In the example I’ve outlined, we’re simply below there being “too many” and now we have to make subjective choices.
You say “tens of thousands” are too many. What’s the right number? How many kids should get 800/800 each year?
