<p>I think what colleges try to avoid is admitting the kind of student who asks, "Is this going to be on the test?" rather than having genuine curiosity. On the other hand, if "diligent" is bad, certainly it is much worse for the recommendation letter to say "lazy."</p>
<p>Tokenadult, what's your opinion on how colleges try to distinguish between those types of students? I certainly think colleges should make that distinction, looking for students with active interest in their studies rather than just hard workers, but I don't know how someone would go about communicating genuine curiosity to colleges. Of course, the interview is a major part of that, but how does one strike the balance between actively curious and eager to please?</p>
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Tokenadult, what's your opinion on how colleges try to distinguish between those types of students? I certainly think colleges should make that distinction, looking for students with active interest in their studies rather than just hard workers, but I don't know how someone would go about communicating genuine curiosity to colleges.
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<p>I don't think that there is any foolproof way to do this. This is a distinction that tends to be important to colleges, but sometimes high school isn't a good setting in which to demonstrate genuine curiosity. My son is working on a long-term computer programming project, which, if some other adult can verify it, may serve better than any recommendation from a course teacher to verify that he has his own curiosity and initiative. My son is only just barely eager to please [wry grin], not being obnoxious but definitely also not being a grade-grubber, so his curiosity shows by what he does when he is trying to get done with schoolwork to do his own projects.</p>
<p>The one teacher who shared his rec with us did an amazing job of combining my son's hard work with a sense that he loved to learn for the sake of learning and always brought positive energy into class. It was perfection on a page as far as I was concerned.</p>