<p>“admissions people think they can tell an essay that shows the student’s authentic voice from one that has been crafted by adults–but I just don’t buy it.” Neither do I. My kids have both been accused, more than once, of plagiarizing their essays. (This stopped once the teachers got to know them better). If school teachers with decades of experience can’t tell what a kid wrote, I don’t see why admission officers would do any better. They’re just people; they don’t have godlike powers.</p>
<p>Indeed. Assuming that STEM students can’t write is rather faulty. One of the best writers I know in person is someone from my HS. He intended to major in CS but wrote memorable searing short stories. Come decision time, he agonized between UIUC and Harvard. In the end, he chose H (likely due to parental pressure).</p>
<p>" Why do some colleges seem to put so much value on the essays?"</p>
<p>This is such common sense I’m surprised you don’t get it. It’s not that they put <em>value</em> on the essays. It’s that the essays are what serve to distinguish Bright Student A in Michigan from Bright Student B in Massachusetts and Bright Student C in Georgia. Good lord, you don’t think that these adcoms are swimming in a sea of 3.8’s and 3.9’s, student body presidents and vice presidents, captains of the tennis team, newspaper editors, hospital volunteers, local charity starters and so forth? Isn’t it kind of common sense that they all blur together at one point (who is “better,” the 3.8 student body president or the 3.9 newspaper editor? same darn thing) and the essays are what to serve to humanize and make someone memorable? </p>
<p>This is like saying you “don’t know why” employers put value on the in-person interview. </p>
<p>"So what you are assuming here is that people who are stars in the humanities will produce an essay with resonates with admissions committee. "</p>
<p>No, this is your black-and-white thinking coming to the fore here. No one is saying that humanities students are necessarily better at producing these kinds of essays than STEM-based students. This isn’t about CREATIVE writing. This is about giving a picture of who you are in some way, whether you’re the dreamy Bohemian analyzing Elizabethan poetry in your homemade macrame vest, or the killer scientist who can nail any chemistry equation like that. </p>
<p>Hunt said authentic, as in not crafted by an adult. A good essay does reflect some learning and some of that does come from being sage enough to seek qualified advice. Wouldn’t we all want to see an essay that a kid had the sense to run by someone, improve? Rather than something off the top of his head, with little feedback? How do you really think that bright, worthy 17 year old gets there? </p>
<p>You can glean all sorts of things about a person from his writing, starting with what he chooses to write about. Authentic is tricky because, for many kids, it’s TMI or the wrong sort of info. So, we have to be careful what we mean about authentic. Here, the context is a college app. </p>
<p>New myth:
SAT and ACT scores have a bias toward higher income students and against students with lower incomes.</p>
<p>My perspective:
Admission test results are clearly correlated with higher incomes, but this outcome is primarily a result of the school systems in the US, and the higher importance put on education by the more educated, higher income parents. There may be opportunities to improve the test, and that is good, and should be done. However, assuming that if higher income students and children of highly educated parents achieve better scores, that therefore the test must be biased is silly. I mean, how biased can a numerical math problem be?</p>
<p>People who oppose these admissions tests are just shooting the messenger. What needs to be done is to continue to improve opportunities in public schools, as well as to provide more education for less-educated and lower-income parents regarding the things that some parents do to enhance and support their children’s educations. We need to focus on the real problem.</p>
<p>Higher incomes/better educated? Not necessarily. I might say admissions currently likes grounded kids. Grounding can give a confidence and willingness to breathe and think and set goals and keep them in sight and show that progress. Lots of lower income kids can be grounded and are also getting some pretty amazing mentoring. They can achieve 4.0 also, and take rigor. Their LoRs can show this isn’t some bored teacher. </p>
<p>You don’t have to fully “oppose” testing to say: they are not the be all and end all. Everyone likes a nice score- it’s just not the only measure of worth and potential. And, hey, stats aren’t IRL, either.</p>
<p>@collegealum314
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<p>No, that is pretty much the opposite of what I wrote.</p>
<p>I certainly hope there are a few STEM kids entering college who are capable of coming up with original ideas and out-of-the-box thinking. </p>
<p>“You don’t have to fully “oppose” testing to say: they are not the be all and end all”</p>
<p>I am not conflating people who oppose admissions testing with people who support holistic admissions. I see them as very different. In my mind, I was introducing a new myth, not disagreeing with any of the prior posts.</p>
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<p>I never said or implied anything about STEM students. The post I responded to gave a long list of skills one might exercise in a humanities class. I read it as saying that people who have trouble with essays likely had trouble analyzing poems and/or interpreting a work of prose. My confusion arose from the fact that coming up with an insightful interpretation of a poem or prose requires originality and creativity. They seem to be arguing that you can do these things without originality, and this deficiency hurts them in writing an essay. </p>
<p>@collegealum314 – NO, you pulled a quote from my post #155 which did not include any “list of skills”, long or short. </p>
<p>The point of that post was that colleges like to see originality in essays, and that studying to improve the score on the SAT CR or writing test, would be counter-productive, because the SAT rewards conventional, rule-bound thinking. Math has “right” answers. Literature doesn’t. In order to design the test to be difficult enough so that the scores will fall in the desired, bell curve range – the questions have to be based on writing that is somewhat ambiguous, and the questions have to call for inferences that can be drawn from the text. But in that context, not everyone is going to agree with the interpretation favored by the test designers.</p>
<p>The fact that could read my words and come to a conclusion so utterly different than what I intended is a good illustration of the point. A typical SAT question would have you read that “passage” and then answer a set of multiple choice questions about what I meant. You pulled a sentence out in isolation without considering the context of the entire post – (the reference to “risk” essays in the preceding paragraph, and the concluding sentence of the paragraph referencing studying for the SAT - “How is that student going to know or figure out that the key to a good essay is originality?”) – so you missed the point." I wasn’t talking about literary skills-- I was saying that the SAT encourages and rewards conventionality of thought, whereas the best college essays are the ones that manage to come up with something new and different. </p>
<p>How do you feel about the SAT II Literature test, calmom? More reward for conventionality of thought, or a test of the ability to understand literature? </p>
<p>I have never taken it. I have no definite opinion on it.</p>
<p>I do think that the SAT rewards “parsing.” But this makes some sense to me, because the ability to parse helps with analytical thinking, in some contexts. In the physical sciences, parsing helps to discern fairly subtle differences between scientific statements that are superficially the same, but actually inequivalent. The same is true in mathematics. I think that the ability to parse would also help in the law and in psychoanalysis.</p>
<p>Yup. But IRL, parsing can also be an end in itself, an idle distraction, even a fixation. At that point, it satisfies only that individual. Sometimes, we have to stay on track. Just because the idle curiosity surfaces, doesn’t lend it a place or validity. Random still equals random. </p>
<p>Meh–well, okay, my original response was kind of rude. Sorry! </p>
<p>But it is clear that we have quite different philosophies, lookingforward. I also think that we have a different idea of what the track is, in a CC conversation, part of the time. I don’t have a purely idle curiosity about the differences in our views. </p>
<p>Even when one puts up a quick post, I think that one’s underlying world view affects one’s word choices, and the word choices give clues to the parts of one’s world view that are not expressed explicitly (and perhaps left unexpressed intentionally). Freud made “Freudian slips” famous, and I have certainly encountered a few of those in real life–and probably committed one or two. But I think that specific words or phrases do reveal how one thinks, even when the impact is not so drastic as to be classed as a Freudian slip. </p>
<p>She made a point about the focus skills needed to prep for a std test, how that draws on different faculties than writing an essay. A good point, valid.</p>
<p>Some sidebars, just saying, belong in PMs. I’m not the post police. But nor am I the only one who notices when threads start to lean more to one individual. That’s all. </p>
<p>A kid does need to breathe to write a good essay. There is no one correct way and the goal isn’t some ultimate rightness of the work. It’s a slice and should be representative. </p>
<p>Assuming that calmom is in California (as opposed to just having a son or daughter who is a student there), then when it’s a better hour in CA, I would be interested in calmom’s view on the SAT II Literature exam, as mentioned in #170.</p>
<p>I agree that with the SAT CR, conventional thinking is helpful; and I agree that conventional thinking is not helpful when it comes to writing an essay. </p>
<p>On the other hand, I think the SAT CR often involves figuring out the meaning of writing by someone that the student has never met. The SAT CR is very much grounded in American culture, to be sure, so someone who has grown up in that culture has an advantage over someone who has not, in trying to figure things out. But on the whole, I would think that someone who does well on the SAT CR is a bit more likely to “get” other people than someone who does not–again, culture plays a definite role here.</p>
<p>With regard to college application essays, I am glad that I don’t have to write any more of them! mathmom has posted some interesting comments about her sons’ essays (perhaps on a different thread) that I think would be useful for a STEM-type trying to write a somewhat autobiographical statement.</p>
<p>But let me ask some specific questions: What about including dialogue in the personal statement? Is this something that successful applicants do more often that not? Or is its inclusion random? What about the statements that open with the student in some far-flung locale, about to experience an epiphany? (Personally, I think a statement like that can be effective, but only if it’s done really, really well.) Do other people on this forum like or hate the “You Are There!” type of statements, or are they neutral? Also, could we have a concrete example of “Show, don’t tell”? </p>
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<p>OK, I didn’t realize you were talking about standardized tests since “interpreting a line of poetry,” one of your examples, is not something which would be on any standardized test. So I assumed you were talking about performance in english class.</p>
<p>I would like to thank Matmaven for starting this thread and having the fortitude to stick with it long enough to give it life. Once I got past the first few pages of people trying to shout down others for their opinions, and learned to ignore the random scud bombs dropped by an angry poster throughout, I found some fantastic dialogue and depth of discussion. There is a lot of nuanced wisdom that has been teased out in this thread.</p>
<p>Cleary, one-size-fits-all does not exist in the world of elite college admissions. For example, the MIT admin’s advice to students to quit taking Saturday tests after they have hit a certain score is good advice for MIT. At some other elite schools not named MIT this advice is not good. Heck, for other admission admins at MIT this might not be good advice as admissions employees are just as human as the kids that they sit in judgment over. Each and every school has it’s own mission, it’s own institutional imperatives and biases, it’s own list of characteristics, requirements, and checklists that guide and drive their admissions process. What is true for Brown is not completely true for Northwestern which is not completely true for Duke which is not completely true for Rice which is not completely true for Caltech. It appears that this varying shades-of-gray concept is hard to accept by quite a few people. </p>
<p>"What about including dialogue in the personal statement? Is this something that successful applicants do more often that not? Or is its inclusion random? What about the statements that open with the student in some far-flung locale, about to experience an epiphany? (Personally, I think a statement like that can be effective, but only if it’s done really, really well.) "</p>
<p>Re including dialogue in the personal statement or the student in a far-flung locale experiencing an epiphany – what about it? It depends on the story that is being told, no?</p>
<p>To me, what you’re trying to do is like saying – I want to write a song that will touch people’s hearts.
Do I start with appoggiaturas? Do I set it in F major or d minor? What if I add a cello? Should I make it 3/4 time or 4/4 time? Will that make it a better song? </p>
<p>Any of these things can be highly effective, and any of these things can be completely ineffective. Just like songs in F major can be great, or songs in F major can be horrid. </p>
<p>I swear, I have never met people so literal as those I “meet” on CC. </p>
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<p>I wouldn’t be so sure. I have heard some adcoms claim that they would worry about the kid’s mental state if they keep taking SAT repeatedly if their scores are not altering much.</p>