<p>Son’s older brother (who from his SAT essay score we could agree was not going to be the next John Steinbeck) did a delightful essay based on “what I learned at robotics competition” (or something like that.) It wasn’t a 5 paragraph essay, but it was fun to read and was in HIS voice. The college he sent it to must have liked it, cause he got in and got money.</p>
<p>“Maybe colleges do read the essays. I typically just thought it was mostly about stats.”</p>
<p>For most colleges, admission is mostly about stats. Essays are important for admission to the very top colleges like HPYS because they attract as many as 10 times as many qualified applicants (i.e. applicants with the scores, grades, coursework reflecting that they could handle the college’s academics) than they have room to accept. Consequently, such colleges can use essays to admit students to create the kind of engaged ,well rounded student bodies that those colleges view as their hallmark.</p>
<p>Some colleges that are excellent, but not at the very top, use essays to make sure that they admit students who are likely to accept their admissions offer and be the kind of students who flourish and stay at their college. Chicago and I suspect Tufts and Reed fit in this category.</p>
<p>Some college use essays to help determine who gets merit aid.</p>
<p>^^Sense of deja vu here. I’m sure I’ve seen this discussion before!</p>
<p>Yes, at some schools after they choose all the students with 2350+ on SATs, 4.0 average, and tons of APs, they have to look at the essays to begin to differentiate between them.</p>
<p>Except they don’t choose all the students with 2350+ SATs, 4.0 averages, and tons of APs, and then use the essays to differentiate between them. They go much, much deeper into the pile.</p>
<p>^^You are correct, of course, but among those students with those stats, that is how they differentiate. That and GC & teacher reccs.</p>
<p>So is it possible to be highly intelligent without being creative?</p>
<p>According to the below research, creativity does not correlate with intelligence. Consequently, the colleges that desire creative and highly intelligent students would find only a portion of the highly intelligent students to be good fits.</p>
<p>This also should be reassuring to some of the people reading this thread who may have been fearing that if they aren’t creative, they’re not creative.</p>
<p>I’ve seen research indicating that people who think they’re creative tend to be creative. I’m guessing that may be because they’re more likely than others to allow themselves to take creative leaps.</p>
<p>“Some research has shown that creativity test scores are independent from IQ scores, whereas other research has shown a relationship between the two. To clarify the cumulative evidence in this field, a quantitative review of the relationship between creativity test scores and IQ scores was conducted. Moderating influences of IQ tests, IQ score levels, creativity tests, creativity subscales, creativity test types, gender, age, and below and above the threshold (IQ 120) were examined. Four hundred forty-seven correlation coefficients from 21 studies and 45,880 participants were retrieved. The mean correlation coefficient was small (r = .174; 95% CI = .165 ? .183), but heterogeneous; this correlation coefficient indicates that the relationship between creativity test scores and IQ scores is negligible. Age contributed to the relationship between intelligence and creativity the most; different creativity tests contributed to it secondly. This study does not support threshold theory…”
[Can</a> Only Intelligent People Be Creative? A Meta-Analysis](<a href=“http://www.eric.ed.gov:80/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=EJ698316&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=EJ698316]Can”>http://www.eric.ed.gov:80/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=EJ698316&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=EJ698316)</p>
<p>“Son’s older brother (who from his SAT essay score we could agree was not going to be the next John Steinbeck) did a delightful essay based on “what I learned at robotics competition” (or something like that.)”</p>
<p>Since the SAT writing is scored in a very formulaic way, I’d bet that the best writers receive OK scores, but don’t receive top scores. They’d probably approach their essays in out of the box ways, and that wouldn’t get as many points as essays done by reasonably bright students diligently following guidelines learned in prep courses.</p>
<p>GFG: Depends on what you mean by highly intelligent & creative. </p>
<p>You can be intelligent and boring, with no personality whatsoever, or intelligent and lacking in mechanical or practical skills. Or artistic/musical skills or a sense of humor.</p>
<p>You can be brilliant at some things but not at others. Great at math/physics, but not a good writer or even a good speaker/explainer. </p>
<p>You can be useful for some purposes but not so much fun to have around.</p>
<p>It takes all kinds of people to make up a world, obviously. Or a college freshman class.</p>
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<p>I have one friend who is clearly one of the people of highest intelligence I have ever met, and she absolutely disclaims any creativity, with some justification. She is an awesome processor of information, and she can solve puzzles like all get out. She used to do the tax structuring on international transactions in her spare time – it was just a sideline to her real practice areas. She was #1 in her class at Yale College (the only perfect GPA in her class), at Yale Law School (ditto), and in the PPE program at Oxford (based on degree grade). She can (and does) type 160 wpm, accurately, while carrying on a conversation. But she very rarely comes up with original ideas.</p>
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<p>Of course. The two aspects do not require each other; however, they also do not exclude each other. (= A prevalent myth).</p>
<p>Those of us who have worked with and studied the truly intellectually gifted (as opposed to just bright/capable, etc.) have noticed how often that giftedness spills over into artistry of various kinds – including even the ability to approach academic problems in creative ways. This is not surprising. (Again, if one is around giftedness a lot and has studied it.)</p>
<p>Interestingly, most of the research shows that those at the extreme end of the intelligence dimension fare no better in their careers than those who are somewhat above the midrange (about 120 IQ by that measure). Being very intelligent appears not to confer much of an advantage.</p>
<p>“Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell makes for some very interesting reading on this subject.</p>
<p>I read the essay, but just skimmed the posts … so maybe someone mentioned it & I missed it. Someone should have edited it! The grammar mistakes just jumped off the screen & assaulted my eyes. It was a bit too flowery for my taste, although it was certainly creative. But too risque? No.</p>
<p>extreme end of the intelligence dimension
extreme end of the creativity dimension
extreme end of the intellectuality dimension</p>
<p>What are they? How do we know they are at the extreme ends? When will they be at the extreme ends?
Do they converge or diverge?</p>
<p>" the extreme end of the intelligence dimension fare no better in their careers than those who are somewhat above the midrange (about 120 IQ by that measure)"</p>
<p>Probably because at the extreme ends, people differ from even above average and moderately gifted people as much as people with average intelligence differ from people who are developmentally disabled. Unless they also have extremely high social intelligence, the people at the extreme ends would have such unusual thinking that potential supervisors and coworkers wouldn’t be able to relate to them.</p>
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<p>Developmentally disabled DOES NOT equal intellectual disability or low IQ; it’s a very broad term that includes early onset physical and sensory disabilities.</p>
<p>psych: What’s the correct term now for people who have subnormal IQ, the people who used to be called “mentally ■■■■■■■■” or is “mentally ■■■■■■■■” still the correct term to use? Lots has changed since I was in grad school and learned how to do IQ assessment.</p>
<p>I do like the Tufts essay, for the most part. It’s interesting to me because I think my son got into Chicago EA I think largely based on his quirky essays and hopes to do the same with Tufts. He’s working on a prompt where you reimagine US History if the British had won at Yorktown. He likes to write, he’s good at thinking out of the box. I think both schools are just feel that the quirkier essay questions elicit more interesting responses than “what I learned from my grandmother” and “how the big game taught me life lessons”. In the end I think these weird questions will give the admissions committees a much better idea of what my son is like than the more usual questions. (That said in years past I’ve been pretty unimpressed with other Tufts favorite essays.)</p>
<p>Amusingly at GW they practically begged the applicants to make up their own prompts they get so bored with the Common App. suggestions.</p>
<p>By the way the only current student I know at Tufts was obnoxious as an 8th grader, but I’ve really enjoyed her in the last couple of years. She’s doing engineering and is smart and funny. She wrote her essays about how she became aware of the condition of women in the world from the experience of having traveled in the Middle East and her parents getting offers to buy her in two separate countries.</p>
<p>NSM: It’s tricky. “Mental retardation” is still acceptable <em>diagnostic</em> nomenclature in the DSM IV, but people in the field of disability/disability psych use the term “[people with] intellectual disability,” as do most major disability organizations (the former American Association on Mental Retardation, for example, officially changed its name–and that of its journal–to the American Association on Intellectual Disability). Some people also use cognitive disability (though that’s problematic for a host of reasons, e.g., disabilities resulting from TBI) or intellectual/developmental disability (IDD; problematic for the reasons I mentioned above). In broad terms, the most widely accepted terminology seems to be “intellectual disability,” at the moment.</p>