<p>^^Is it just me, or is “Textureless math grinds” a great name for a band?</p>
<p>
There’s no cap at MIT, nor at any of its peer schools.</p>
<p>So a better (but not necessarily the best) way to present yourself is basically: “I am not a robot.”</p>
<p>You see james, your reasoning works both ways. If Every asian tries to diversify themselves (or at least “look” diversified, which sometimes is really sad) instead of presenting themselves as they are, you will stand out by being hardcore interested in math and science. If you are one of the few guys who dares to just shows how hardcore you are about learning, you will stand out. One of the impressions I get is many people who are very intense about math/science weaken their applications by trying to look diversified just for the sake of it. And if I can see through that kind of thing, admission committees can too. By trying to look diversified, they just dilute their main passions, and are diffuse.</p>
<p>Right, I mean I can certainly think of times when presenting oneself as one is won’t necessarily benefit one’s chances greatly, but I don’t think it really hurts, given if it’s clear that someone is just hardcore about learning, there’s little to do to change that image, and one can only strive to make a good case for one’s attitude towards learning.</p>
<p>Definitely I have met far fewer people who are extremely hardcore about learning by my standards than those who are pretty smart and fun people. I think for these people, it just doesn’t make sense to mask anything. It kind of depends on their individual fortune from what I’ve seen for hardcore intellectuals who don’t give a damn about any other kind of marketing.</p>
<p>For some others though who’re studious but not quite just “pure,” hardcore intellectuals, I think with a little bit of the right marketing, they could make it into some schools with much more certainty than if they didn’t put that effort into marketing themselves.</p>
<p>There is an Asian ceiling. The schools can’t admit this fact, though. If they did admit this, then the Department of Justice might say “naughty, naughty” and lash them with a wet noodle.</p>
<p>To most of the elite schools, heading down the path of UC Berkeley (where Asians outnumber whites) is the kiss of death. Fewer top white students would want to attend, and then you would have a classic case of white flight (academic version).</p>
<p>The only elite school that does not have quotas is Caltech, which admits applicants based purely on academic merit. They don’t even have preferences for alumni children, women, athletes or URMs. As a result, their class is roughly 1/3 Asian, 1/3 women, and URMs % in the low single digits.</p>
<p>MIT, like virtually all of its peer schools, practices social engineering with its class. For example, about 50% of this year’s class is female. Without preferences, that % would probably fall to 33% as with Caltech.</p>
<p>Most informed people on this board know that being Asian is the “anti-hook”. Please don’t act like you’re shocked to hear this, like that French policeman in “Casablanca”.</p>
<p>I’m just pointing out that there’s a difference between affirmative action (which MIT and other top schools freely announce that they practice) and a quota system for members of different races.</p>
<p>There are no quotas at MIT.</p>
<p>The student body composition in MIT is too “balanced” to be merit based. You will have to claim that female applicants for MIT are generally more qualified than male to make it male/female ratio 1 to 1, because there is a 2 to 1 male to female ratio in MIT applicantion pool. Similarly, the admission rate for Asians is lower in comparision with any other race group. Does this mean that the pool of Asian applicants is generally less qualified? It would be interesting if MIT releases some detail information.</p>
<p>By the way, MIT doesn’t have to explicitly anounce target ceilings in the review to make a quota. They are too smart for being this dumb. There are simply too many ways to get around it.</p>
<p>
Check out Caltech’s admissions stats – females are admitted at a higher rate there, too, in the absence of affirmative action. </p>
<p>I’m not, of course, alleging that race and gender don’t matter in the MIT admissions process, because clearly they do. But admissions decisions are made in committee on an individual level. There’s no alarm bell that goes off when the committee has admitted “enough” of one particular group.</p>
<p>Incidentally, I don’t understand why there’s not an uproar about region-based affirmative action-like practices. I mean, students from the Northeast make up a greater percentage of the applicant pool than the admit pool, and vice versa for applicants from generally underrepresented states, but nobody howls about that or suggests that there are quotas in effect for students from California or New York. If you’re going to howl, at least be consistent about your howling.</p>
<p>13,854 college-bound senior girls scored between 750-800 on the math portion of the SAT in 2008. The numbers keep rising year after year. There now exists no difference in the math and science GPA scores of males and females in U.S. high schools. You can find the statistics here: <a href=“http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/Total_Group_Report.pdf[/url]”>Higher Education Professionals | College Board. In 2009, 2,110 girls qualified to take the American Invitational Math Exam (AIME): [AIME</a> I & II 2008 Statistics](<a href=“http://www.unl.edu/amc/e-exams/e7-aime/e7-1-aimearchive/2009-aa/09-AIMEstats.shtml]AIME”>http://www.unl.edu/amc/e-exams/e7-aime/e7-1-aimearchive/2009-aa/09-AIMEstats.shtml).</p>
<p>Here’s my point: If MIT wants to have a class balanced by gender, there are thousands of qualified females from which to choose.</p>
<p>“then the Department of Justice might say “naughty, naughty” and lash them with a wet noodle.”</p>
<p>LOL. :D</p>
<p>One thing I do remember hearing in the MIT admissions video to alumni intereviews on the class of 2012 was that the spectrum <em>of talent I guess</em> is narrower for the female applicant pool than the male. Meaning I presume that out of the female applicants a significantly larger percentage are qualified for MIT than the male applicants.</p>
<p>Yes, the traditional answer to the question is ‘girls are more self-selecting’ - I guess girls are more likely to consider whether they’re actually qualfied for MIT and not just apply to see if they get in. But honestly, if MIT was only 25% female, do you think as many boys would apply? College definitely wouldn’t be as much fun for me if I went to a place that was 75% female.</p>
<p>Caltech may bend a little for female applicants, but MIT undergraduate admission (probably not graduate school), like other IVY league schools, is performing a transparent social balancing act here. Yes, MIT might also take into consideration of regional balance, too.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, for 2110 girls, there are 7509 boys qualified for AIME, too. Furthermore, the average score for boys is higher, and there is a lot more boys qualified for USAMO, the higher level competition. Here is the list of USAMO qualifiers: <a href=“http://www.unl.edu/amc/e-exams/e8-usamo/e8-1-usamoarchive/2009-ua/09-Qual_list.pdf[/url]”>http://www.unl.edu/amc/e-exams/e8-usamo/e8-1-usamoarchive/2009-ua/09-Qual_list.pdf</a>. There are so many Asian kids who were born outside of this country in the list that you may wonder whether this is a Chinese or Korean math Olympiad. </p>
<p>I hope that MIT will release the SAT and GPA range for either gender applicants. For those claiming female applicants for MIT more talented than male applicants, they should provide some hard information instead of “talent I guess” by alumni.</p>
<p>^^Caltech does not bend admissions at all for female candidates or other URMs.</p>
<p>No one really knows how much gender helps in MIT admissions. From what I have heard, it is very slight. I don’t know about regional preference. Former President Chuck Vest said there was zero regional preference. In his words, “you’re not here because you’re from Montana,” a subtle dig at ivies. Stu Schmill seemed to imply that there was some attempt to have regional diversity if possible, although not there are usually a few states not represented in spite of having applicants.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Frankly, who cares?</p>
<p>Okay, that’s probably just me. Carry on.</p>
<p>The slight preference results in 3 fold higher admission rate for girls. That is pretty effective.</p>
<p>Well, I understand that people don’t trust admission office propaganda, but I think self-selection by females is a powerful factor in this. I went to a magnet school, and the only girls that applied had perfect grades/stats, yet a lot of guys applied with mediocre stats. </p>
<p>Proof that self-selection can be important is Caltech’s male-female acceptance statistics. Females have a higher acceptance rate at Caltech, yet there is no preference whatsoever.</p>
<p>It appears that you are arguing female applicants for MIT more qualified than male in general. This makes the release of academic information from MIT, particularly about those top 10 percentile applicants from either gender and ethnic groups, more crucial to resolve this myth.</p>
<p>Harvardfan, your reasoning is flawed. No one on this thread has argued that female applicants are more qualified than male applicants to MIT. I’ve posted statistics showing no difference in the math and science GPAs of high school senior males and females. The proportion of females in the top decile of math SAT scores has continued to grow since the 1970s; this is true also of the proportion of females in the top ranks of AIME scores (look through the archives, which are online). Additionally, we could look at ISEF winners, where last year’s crop was entirely female. But to some extent, none of this gets to the real point, which is that universities admit the students they want.</p>
<p>The University of California system admits largely on the basis of GPA and standardized scores, with the result that most campuses are now roughly 60% female and 40% male (source: the websites of individual campuses like UCLA and Berkeley). How do you think Harvard and Yale manage to keep the proportion roughly equal among their undergraduates, given that the standardized test scores of females in critical reading and writing are higher than those of males? My guess is that Harvard and Yale are interested in preserving some sort of gender balance at their institutions.</p>
<p>It seems plausible to me that the average female pool could be more qualified than the average male pool. I guess, though, this “release of academic info” may not do the trick, given that it’s far from straightforward to predict what MIT will make of a given application to me. Though, of course it’d confirm if there are blatantly egregious disparities between different admits.</p>
<p>But seriously, I haven’t met very many girls whom I could see considering MIT. Whether or not this warrants the much higher percentage admit rate is debatable – I don’t know how many girls apply. If there’re few enough applicants, what’s happening could be totally logical. I guess there must be a difference in admissions philosophies between MIT and Caltech though, if there are differences among the distributions at Caltech?</p>
<p>Fun fact: I forget if this was exactly it, but I believe my good friend applying to graduate school in mathematics discovered that if one went by percentages, it might be harder to get into some school that appeared well off the top few list than it would be to make it to UChicago (in a normal year, accounting for the fact that this year, UChicago apparently considerably shrank their class).</p>