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<p>Ironic considering MIT has had a reputation of throwing some of the best college parties in the greater Boston area. </p>
<p>Comparatively speaking, the atmosphere at Harvard and Tufts is such many students from those and other nearby campuses who wanted to have a fun college party experience tended to head down to MIT. </p>
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Agreed. There are outliers but predominantly the admitted students have high stats regardless their background. To increase the diversity on campus, someone with say an SAT score of 2200 may be chosen over someone with 2300. In other words, the minimum bar for the majority who could ever have a chance is pretty high. However, Pinker doesn’t think it’s good enough. His idea for improvement of the admission process is this:</p>
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Then he went on explaining why (I know it’s a bit long but I think it’s a reasonably interesting read). </p>
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I think I could believe it (i.e., crazy-busy part.)</p>
<p>At one time, I told my colleague that DS told us that he mostly valued the kind of extracurricular activities at his college and he thought he could achieve the same at a state school on the academic front (not really very “super academics” like on the PhD track though - I think he was not into that track after he had known the life of many post-docs in the lab as his friends).</p>
<p>My colleague told me that I should push back his idea about the purpose of going to a college and told him explicitly that his priority is not correct. I did not. It appears to me that, in his next round of application to schools, he again dodged the bullet of being labeled as just an academic grind (like those students at CUNY were often accused of in early 1900s), or even worse, being too nerdy or not socially fit. In a sense, he just dutifully did what the “system” wants him to do.</p>
<p>“What did Pinker say about his ideal Harvard?”</p>
<p>He wants a lot of future professors, it seems. People who are going to be breaking new intellectual ground in their fields. People who would not skip lecture in favor of the dress rehearsal for a concert where they will be singing for Bill Clinton (as I did).</p>
<p>“It’s not clear from the language how much academics is weighted for the other 90% admitted.”</p>
<p>Not in this article, no. I think Pinker is assuming that the reader knows from other sources that the 3.9/2100+ is more or less the entry ticket into the competition (at least for middle-class white kids), and that non-academic factors control after that point.</p>
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<p>Well, people disagree on just how much academic prowess is required to “get in the game.” My own educated guess was that it was about National Merit Finalist level.</p>
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<p>Those accusations were used historically as justification to impose quotas against Jewish and Eastern/South European immigrant kids. Those groups were viewed by Ivy/older private colleges as threats because they outperformed those who were viewed by admins/trustees/most alums as their main constituents…scions of wealthy WASP families. </p>
<p>Ironically, the “grind” accusation tends to be used more recently in the same ways against Asian-Americans and/or those from lower SES groups. </p>
<p>At my own private college, it seemed to be used by some oblivious higher SES students against lower-SES students who didn’t come from higher SES families with kids who had no worries about earning C/C-s as they invariably have a job waiting for them at the family/family friend’s business/non-profit. </p>
<p>Yes, those of us with FA/scholarship packages don’t have the luxury of being relaxed when having a bad semester could mean we may not be able to continue on at college as there’s little/no financial/family safety net or connections to fall back on if our academic performance falls short. Especially considering those of us with scholarship packages are required to meet higher performance standards than classmates from comfortably full-pay families. </p>
<p>Re: #225</p>
<p>The phenomenon described is not all that much different from what Vance Packard described in 1959, when HYP admitted academically elite students from public schools along with scions of the SES-elite from the then-SES-elite boarding schools. The public school alumni were the strivers who fulfilled their part of HYP’s academically elite reputation, while the boarding school alumni were content with gentleman’s C grades, knowing that their inherited SES status ensured an easy life afterward as long as they graduated and seeing the strivers as beneath them.</p>
<p>This sounds like a game of who’s more elite. </p>
<p>It takes a highly arrogant person to claim only 5% have the academic merit.</p>
<p>“He wants a lot of future professors, it seems. People who are going to be breaking new intellectual ground in their fields. People who would not skip lecture in favor of the dress rehearsal for a concert where they will be singing for Bill Clinton (as I did).”</p>
<p>I never missed a single class in college til spring of my senior year when I underwent some minor surgery, but heckyes I’d skip a class lecture in favor of a dress rehearsal for a concert in which I’d be singing to a president (any president), and I’d absolutely tell my kids to do the same. </p>
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<p>Actually, the future Profs may also skip classes to say…attend academic conferences related to their field or to tour grad schools to see where they want to do their PhD programs. </p>
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<p>Can you please articulate what you hoped to achieve in your college classes, what you hoped to take away from that? How close to a “future professor” would your approach be in the classroom to achieve those goals? What is the optimal level of engagement in the classroom for a future CEO? </p>
<p>I don’t know how typical I was. I was in the top 5ish% of my class by GPA, but didn’t do a thesis. I wasn’t very invested in research after my transfer (I had worked in three psych labs prior to that and decided against a psych PhD by junior year). I cared a lot about learning as much as I could in my courses and doing well, and I was successful at that. On the other hand, I decidedly prioritized my music and theater obligations when there was a conflict. Conflicts didn’t come up that often, fortunately. My academics were more like my job. My music was my life and my family. I think most people who put academics in second place as much as I did mostly didn’t do as well.</p>
<p>Future CEOs can skip lecture all they want (as long as they’re learning their math, IMHO). The opportunities to develop leadership skills are mostly elsewhere. But future professors ought to be people whose passion for their subject transcends everything else. I agree that they might be skipping lecture to spend more time in the lab or library or at a symposium.</p>
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This reminds me of the following.</p>
<p>There was a class-related web site at DS’s school where the students could leave a comment after they log in to see their grade after a semester is over. DS told us that a student had left a comment like this: Any student who did great in this class is a low-life who did nothing but studying, eating “some dirty word started with sh”, and sleeping, and does absolutely nothing else in his life. Quite a tasteless comment. You would never imagine a student at such a school would make a comment like this. </p>
<p>But I could imagine that when a student has always been an A student and he takes a midterm and the class average on this test is like 46 out of 100, and he does not do so well, it may be a huge hit on his ego. - to be sure, DS did mentioned that a student, after having received a B- or something on orgo I, managed to devote almost all of her waking hours in the library to the study of orgo II. (Heard that in the end she was also graduated as a PBK like DS, and she received both BS and MS in 4 years. But a student like her still could have an “oops” moment in some classes where the number of test items on an exam is only 3 (midterm) or 5 (final) and the professor rarely gives out “partial credits” on any test item. This kind of class is unlike some of the non-STEM classes where the grading is much more lenient.)</p>
<p>I thought the Pinker article was pretty interesting, but I think he may be mistaken if he thinks admitting solely by grades and scores would result in more academics. I think it might result in even more preprofessionals, especially engineers and premeds. That potential classics professor may not have such a strong math SAT score. What’s more, you’d probably find that you had too much geographical concentration, and that you weren’t getting enough low-SES and URM kids, and your sports teams were lousy, etc., etc. Then you’d have to tweak the system–in lots of ways–until you end up with something that would look a lot like what Harvard is doing right now. Why bother?</p>
<p>@Hunt, yes, you’d have schools full of the kids from states where the NMSF PSAT cutoff is 224 with only a few from the states where the cutoff is 204. </p>
<p>It’s worth noting that Pinker is from Canada. Canadian universities don’t evaluate the non-academic attributes of their applicants as far as I know. So this may inform his point-of-view. </p>
<p>I think it’s good to have some dissent.</p>
<p>“you’d probably find that you had too much geographical concentration, and that you weren’t getting enough low-SES and URM kids, and your sports teams were lousy, etc.”</p>
<p>Right, though not everybody cares about that.</p>
<p>Harvard might find that its alumni care a lot more about some of those things than its faculty does.</p>
<p>I agree with part–but not all–or what Pinker says</p>
<p>I disagree with Hanna’s idea that basing admissions on SATs and GPAs would yield a class full of future academics. I think you’d end up with a fair number of future engineers, lawyers, doctors, and McKinsey/Bain,etc. consultant-types. My D had a lot of friends in both high school and college who had 1600 SAT scores (CR + M). Only one went on to get a PhD and he isn’t an academic. </p>
<p>“I think you’d end up with a fair number of future engineers, lawyers, doctors, and McKinsey/Bain,etc. consultant-types.”</p>
<p>I don’t see what’s so special about being an academic / professor compared to any other field, and I am perplexed by why I’m supposed to think that they are more special. </p>