<p>
</p>
<p>Are you talking about my third response? I wasn’t referring to OP there, I was answering this question:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The question seemed general so my response was general. It was not referring to OP.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I think we’re miscommunicating. I’m saying that there are students at MIT who only did academically-related things in high school – like research, independent projects, additional college classes, or competitions in their field of interest. That’s what I’m referring to with a “pointy applicant”. </p>
<p>I think the number of high schools with curriculum comparable to MIT courses is astonishingly few. And I don’t think leadership positions or community service are weighed particularly heavily compared to other extracurriculars. Now, if you take a leadership position and really do something new and interesting, I think that can be a boost in the same way pushing the boundaries of other extracurriculars can be. But leadership titles in themselves are often not actually good indicators of doing much.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I was more referring to students taking all their classes at local universities. A decent state university (University of Minnesota) doesn’t have offer a curriculum comparable to MIT but its advanced classes are as difficult or more difficult than introductory classes at MIT. Obviously, this isn’t available in most places but there are some where it is relatively easy to do (Minnesota, Ohio, maybe some others). Even in these places taking it’s uncommon for top students to take all their classes at a local college even though it’s very likely top students would learn more at a decent state university. Part of this is social/logistical reasons but I think incentives due to colleges admissions play an important role too. I think if schools like MIT strongly encouraged this when it is feasible the number of students doing so would significantly increase even if it remained rare in an absolute sense.</p>
<p>^ IME, plenty of MIT students did take classes outside of MIT. (I’m not sure if actual numbers on this are published somewhere, but I think this is a fairly common thing.)</p>
<p>I don’t see the value in encouraging this specifically over the many other things high school students may want to do, but as far as I can tell, MIT does place value on it.</p>
<p>There are a LOT of logistical reasons why someone might not want to / be able to their classes at their state university - for example at Ohio State, you can not take English as a high school student unless you have 4 credits of high school English already. Freshman English is also a prereq to most history classes. So unless you’re savvy enough to bypass this requirement, or you go to a school where you can take 4 years of English in less than that amount of time, you are not going to be able to take all your classes at Ohio State. There aren’t really any other options in the area for PSEO that make sense when you take into account that most schools have AP classes. And this is a state that supposedly has a good PSEO system.</p>
<p>I’m confused as to why MIT needs to encourage PSEO programs, rather than state legislatures, or the colleges that have the programs themselves.</p>
<p>I acknowledge there are logistical hurdles to PSEO programs although I think Minnesota’s is more flexible (side note: many people in Minnesota took comparative literature classes for high school English classes as actual English classes were hard to get into). But I think current admissions practices actively discourage students from doing PSEO by failing to weight grades appropriately. </p>
<p>EDIT: There’s one more reason that MIT or elite colleges might want to encourage students to do PSEO that states or local colleges wouldn’t care about. PSEO reveals a lot more information about the academic abilities of high school students than is revealed by high schools which is useful to MIT in making admissions decisions and arguably it makes sense for MIT to create a small incentive for students who do PSEO and reveal this information.</p>
<p>Any idea how these courses would affect a home-schooled student’s application to MIT? This year, I have taken three classes through MIT OCW Scholar (Microeconomics, Multivariable calculus, and Linear algebra), and I’ll probably take a few more next year.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the admissions process is a “black box.” Nobody can confirm with certainty that it will greatly improve your chances. But it can’t hurt you either!</p>