<p>For all the hundreds of threads on this subject over the years, I have never seen even one argument which convinces me that schools who state that they do not consider GPA and SAT to be the only important factor in admissions, and who proceed to select students who, in addition to meeting some very high academic standards, also possess additional non academic qualities which these institutions have stated that they value, have done anything “unfair.” I have never seen one convincing argument that the current holistic policies are resulting in classes of inferior “quality.” On the contrary, the halls of Harvard seem to be, more than ever, bursting to the seams with brilliant, creative, ambitious, high achieving young people who go on to become spectacular adults.</p>
<p>Just one note: when Harvard says that 5 to 10% of its class is admitted based “solely” on academic merit, that doesn’t necessarily mean that those students have the highest scores or high school grades. Indeed, some of the most promising future academics may be quite weak in some areas.</p>
<p>Hey, if all I had going for me were high GPA / high stats, I’d sure as heck want colleges to “reward” only high GPA / high stats and get all pissy if they dared admit someone “lower” than me. It sure is easier than actually developing other talents / interests. </p>
<p>^Well, one of his points is that the other criteria (like community service and/or leadership activities) are less predictive of being a future “mover and shaker” than raw intelligence. Also, he questions the way colleges measure EQ or leadership ability. The SAT is too easy to distinguish people at the top, but people who were very high scorers in the 7th grade have an impressive track record of success in a variety of fields, not just academic pursuits. You may want them to become Sheldon from Big Bang Theory, but they’re not. </p>
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<p>You think his analysis was unsophisticated? To me, there is a gulf separating Derciewicz (sp?) and Pinker in terms of insightfulness and rigor of thought. </p>
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<p>I’m a big Pinker fan, even though I don’t always draw the same conclusions he does. Nonetheless, if you’ve read a lot of his stuff, you’ll be familiar with his biases (not that they’re necessarily unfounded either). He’s a HUGE believer that, all things being equal, nature will trump nurture almost every time. IIRC, he also has a huge blind spot when it comes to the importance of music in the Academy. I’ve often joked I’d love to see him in a cage match with Oliver Sacks on the subject!</p>
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<p>Well, there aren’t many public intellectuals known for their humility, that’s for sure! He’s married to a famous philosopher and he certainly doesn’t lack a sense of humor: <a href=“http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/about/silly.html”>http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/about/silly.html</a></p>
<p>But I don’t think he ever argues in that New Republic piece linked upthread that the SAT is the ideal standardized test either. I think he could have been clearer on that point, but perhaps he ran out of room! I also agree wholeheartedly with others, though, who’ve suggested he seems more suited for MIT than Harvard. I’m guessing the paycheck from (and brand clout of) the latter was ‘an offer he couldn’t refuse!’ </p>
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Well, that’s not saying much. I thought Pinker’s article was pretty good, but I just think he’s mistaken in some of his conclusions.</p>
<p>@Consolation That’s what happened with S1. No special prep classes. He reviewed one of the standard books for a few weeks before-hand - 2300 first sitting. Done. So colleges should rely 100% on the SAT as a measure of achievement, intelligence and future success probability. The rest is all fluff! (It’s a joke, settle down people! I can’t believe this thread is still going.) </p>
<p>^Well, one of his points is that the other criteria (like community service and/or leadership activities) are less predictive of being a future “mover and shaker” than raw intelligence."</p>
<p>This is a real interesting point, because some leadership activities in high school might be a function of high popularity (and aren’t indicative of anything) and other leadership activities are indeed evidence of being a future mover and shaker. And I think it’s difficult to parse those things out. I think of a Bill Clinton in Boys State as an example. </p>
<p>“To me, there is a gulf separating Derciewicz (sp?) and Pinker in terms of insightfulness and rigor of thought.”</p>
<p>I had the same reaction to this as Hunt…damning with faint praise. The high-scoring seventh graders Pinker praises could take down D without much effort. I loved “The Language Instinct,” though.</p>
<p>I know a woman who is a member of Mensa. She never went to college. She’s a retired postal worker now. </p>
<p>Another certified genius I know is a housewife who home schools. </p>
<p>Another very high IQ guy I associate with is a high school teacher.</p>
<p>Since I’m in the medical profession, I work with and around many very, very bright men and women. Many more of them then you would think have some fairly significant social difficulties. Some are crazy, others are weird, a few are truly disturbed yet super smart. They have a lopsided development. Many have Ivy League pedigree but behave like social midgets. </p>
<p>For all of these schools the intellect has to be there in each student. Nobody can just get in from off the street with no proof of intellectual talent. On the other hand, there is a range of gifts and talents not measured on a written exam that are also important. </p>
<p>If you’ve never been around a gifted leader or a person endowed with great charisma, you don’t know what I mean. Leadership is not simply measured and easy to fake. Leaders have qualities and traits that don’t go away when they leave the football field or club officer role, it is a part of them and is found in everything they do. Leaders lead and are very rarely found in the backseat while others do the driving.</p>
<p>And there are so many other qualities that are often not measured that make holistic admissions so much more sensible. As far as who deserves admission, I believe that anyone that has the audacity to attempt to get accepted at elite schools and gets in is truly deserving. This reminds me of a study that showed that kids who applied to elite schools and we’re rejected, attending lower tier schools, outperformed students years down the road who didn’t attempt to get into elite schools. The study concluded that trying to get into elite schools alone is a predictor of future success. Wow!</p>
<p>My bottom line is that admissions is more perfect in part because it’s more lopsided and a little sloppy and arbitrary and people tend to be lopsided, sloppy and arbitrary.</p>
<p>No more excluding people due to skin color or gender or Jewishness or low ses. All these thing happened at times in the good ole days before holistic admissions. Has there ever been a time when only the most deserving students were admitted on purely objective criteria? Are we wishing for something that never has existed? Are we all just numbers assigned to us by some bureaucracy? Who gave the SAT and ACT the monopoly on who should and should not got to one college or another? Couldn’t worth be determined through arm wrestling or hoopla hooping or brown eye color? I know they will say that their tests are statistically validated measures of potential success in college. Bahhhh! What test was used in 1790 or 1810 or 1850? Let’s go back to that.</p>
<p>^Awesome post!</p>
<p>I too loved “The Language Instinct” and I have a soft spot for Pinker as a consequence. (But I am oddly intrigued by the idea of a Pinker/Sacks cage match! What are their respective positions on the importance of music?)</p>
<p>@Madaboutx I like nearly the entire post except going back to 1790 1810 Harvard entry requirements. I suspect the good ol’ boys club was in full swing although I’m sure those admitted were smarter than your average bear.</p>
<p>There is no such thing as different intelligences, just a general “g”.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1998generalintelligencefactor.pdf”>http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1998generalintelligencefactor.pdf</a></p>
<p>Expert judgement only subtract from standardizing testing, not adding to it.</p>
<p><a href=“Everybody’S an Expert | The New Yorker”>Everybody’S an Expert | The New Yorker;
<p>A more interesting question is why the elites deliberately choose a less predictive assessment model… Who are they helping? Who are being hurt? Why?</p>
<p>^iInteresting New Yorker piece. It makes me think of all these climate change, gloom and doom, sky is falling, false prophets of death and calamity. Their predictions fail big one after another, year after year and they keep on predicting the same dumb end of world scenario. Now I have a sense of the egos that do such things.</p>
<p>@patertrium - the gold standard for admissions used to be a very good command of the Greek and Latin languages. Very few applicants to the schools today would display that knowledge.</p>
<p>To get that knowledge, you wouldn’t be a farmers child or a former slave. Maybe there were a few, rare breakouts but very few. Many who score very high on the SAT wouldn’t hit this standard. Not with the crazy schedules kids and their parents keep. A bunch of ECs would be a problem. These languages denote a deep study of the history of world civilization - Rome and Greece - and of the New Testament Scripture - written in Greek.</p>
<p>These guys went on to be engineers, doctors, lawyers, etc. This shows a flaw in our current system of putting kids on a narrow track (known as a major) and not teaching too much outside that track. Colleges developed the minds of people, now they focus more on developing the skills in a particular area which allows elites in politics to control the minds of people. Another reason why the gloom and doom prophets can claim warming is causing a polar vortex and supposedly smart people believe it.</p>
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<p>What? Climate change IS happening. Maybe the level is gloom and doom is extreme to some but the facts are the facts on this.</p>
<p>BTW, I don’t know how anyone could get through that New Yorker article set entirely in italic type. I’m impressed if you did.</p>
<h1>274 The children of farmers did know Greek and Latin, or at least their sons did, the sons of the farmers who owned slaves. Greek and Latin are valuable, also ancient Hebrew and the other biblical languages. However they are part of western culture and our tradition of concentrating on teaching dead white males. Here is a classicist with a different approach: <a href=“Mary Beard Takes On Her Sexist Detractors | The New Yorker”>Mary Beard Takes On Her Sexist Detractors | The New Yorker. I think it is possible to develop minds with many different courses of study. It doesn’t need to be western civ, imho. I think you are correct children of privilege generally have greater access to excellent educational resources.</h1>
<p>adding: I think teaching only western civilization is a pretty narrow track.</p>
<p>There’s a link to the 1869 Harvard Entrance Exam here: <a href=“Could You Pass Harvard's Entrance Exam From 1869? - Slashdot”>Could You Pass Harvard's Entrance Exam From 1869? - Slashdot; I’m pretty sure not too many current students could handle the Latin or Greek, and the Geography is pretty obscure too. I don’t even know what “bound the basin” means. The math covers arithmetic, geometry, trig, logs and algebra, so most students could probably do that. Interestingly students were expected to know how British money worked in order to solve one of the problems.</p>
<p>@dustypig, I’m trying to remember where it was that I read something (may have been an interview actually) where it was clear that Pinker doesn’t value musical aptitude and genius to the same degree he values other types of “intelligence.” It may have something to do with Pinker’s theories about the evolutionary purpose of music. (Google “auditory cheesecake” for a description.) I often wonder what he thought of Sacks’s Musicophilia. Apparently Sacks has been asked about Pinker’s position.You can find it here: </p>
<p><a href=“SPIEGEL Interview with Neurologist Oliver Sacks: 'I Think of Us as a Musical Species' - DER SPIEGEL”>http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/spiegel-interview-with-neurologist-oliver-sacks-i-think-of-us-as-a-musical-species-a-541202.html</a>.</p>
<p>Most of this stuff is WAY over my pay-grade, but it’s all fascinating. And on second thought, McGill’s Daniel Levitan, who wrote the hugely popular This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, is probably a more suitable cage match foe for Pinker. According to Levitan, apparently Pinker and Cornell’s Carol Krumhansl (an expert on music cognition) almost came to blows at some symposium!</p>
<p><a href=“Daniel Levitin on auditory cheesecake and Steven Pinker - part 1 - YouTube”>Daniel Levitin on auditory cheesecake and Steven Pinker - part 1 - YouTube;
<p>[If I were a Harvard student, my first question to Pinker would be, if music serves no substantial evolutionary purpose, why is it so helpful in preserving memories? I don’t remember a whole lot from my college psychology classes about how memories form, but it does seem like learning a song acts as a booster from short-term to long-term memory. Why can I still recall the lyrics to “American Pie” (and today can get many of the allusions that went completely over my head as a child), but can recall none of the hundreds of lines I memorized for various high school plays? Music in that sense, seems to add some evolutionary advantage.]</p>
<p>In reality, I don’t think Pinker has contempt for the “well-rounded student.” I think it’s just that he’d prefer to see Harvard focus on students with precocious intellectual depth in a specific field. He’s scouting future PhDs (even though there aren’t many jobs for any but a few superstars in most fields) and he’s worried Harvard is losing his best prospects to his competitors because of non-academic institutional priorities. </p>
<p>I’m not convinced all those brilliant young academic minds have perfect SAT scores, or that they score equally well on both the math and critical reading components of the test, but his arguments in that TNR piece certainly suggest that. Shouldn’t be all that hard to test his theory!</p>
<p>It occurs to me that the SAT measures not only academic aptitude, but also carefulness and meticulousness. Are these necessary traits for the academic genius? I’m not so sure. And if they aren’t, the future academic superstar may not have perfect scores (or grades) even in his or her field of expertise.</p>