<p>Hunt: Are you suggesting it isn’t a difficult question? Which is your choice? Is it an easy choice for you?</p>
<p>There is a perpetual misconception that a less than perfect ACT/SAT score sentences you to a life with the hoi polloi at a college with a wide open admissions’ door. HYP let in a couple thousand students with ACTs in the 30-34 range. Northwestern, Wash U and Cornell let in even more in the 29-33 range. Ditto for your flagship state school honors programs. Please stop this misleading hysteria. You do not need a perfect ACT/SAT score to get into a great college. You do need a competent ACT/SAT score; rigorous course load; demonstrate you’re not lazy; and show a degree of community engagement, leadership and charisma. You can either pray for reform or do what currently needs to be done.</p>
<p>Well, of course he’s suggesting it’s a difficult question. That’s the whole point. Some of you are sooooooo convinced that the sole, primary purpose of an institution should be producing the future minds of academia, AND that that is “predictable” through test scores, so it should be falling off a log to identify who are those academic brilliant minds and admit them. Hunt is trying to get some of you to think more broadly about the concept of having multiple missions AND about how the usual means of “predictiveness” (test scores, etc.) don’t necessarily identify the future leaders of tomorrow the way some of you wish and hope and pray that they do. </p>
<p>“Fancy universities used to have entrance exams, nothing wrong with that.”</p>
<p>Yes. And nothing, absolutely nothing, prevents any elite university from constructing its own entrance exam and making admissions contingent upon it. Except that they don’t. Because obviously THEY don’t feel such entrance exams tell the whole story, and they are more than satisfied with the classes they obtain through setting a high entrance bar through scores but letting other facets of leadership, creativity, intelligence, etc. be the determining factors. It really means nothing that some observers on CC don’t “like” how they do it. You are all free to start your own universities and create your own criteria, and of course not to send your own kids to these places.</p>
<p>If you disagree with a college’s admissions’ philosophy so much, why would you let your children apply? There are far less pretentious places to spend four years and a couple of hundred thousand dollars than Cambridge, New Haven or Providence. I have no right to tell a private institution how they need to change. But if you’re a tax payer and resident, you do have a right to express concerns with your public colleges.</p>
<p>I’ll bet on stack A. For better or worse, the world wide association of a famous name with the school trumps a guy who won the Nobel prize but is called Marvin instead of Martin. Everyone knows Bill Gates. Few know Martin Karplus. I suspect Harvard knows that in the Bill Gates stack they will also probably get 4-5 people who will go on to do important, valuable research. </p>
<p>PG: When I don’t understand a question, I ask for clarification. This does, of course, expose my ignorance but is the only way for me to increase my understanding. I am too old to be embarrassed by not having all the answers. I am embarrassed if I’m a jerk, and try to correct that behavior. Sometimes that has to be explained to me as well. Life won’t be too interesting if I ever do figure out all the answers. I guess I could just go sit on a mountain and answer questions. Doesn’t sound too fun to me.</p>
<p>@jayhawk1 “I have no right to tell a private institution how they need to change.”</p>
<p>Eh, sort of. These institutions are given enormous public privileges in the form of charity/nonprofit status (which gets them out of a whole boatload of taxes), not to mention research grants and the government subsidising loans to their customers. In return, the public are entitled to some views on what these institutions do.</p>
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<p>The problem with this whole question is that Bill Gates and Marvin Karplus are in the same stack…At age 18, they are pretty indistinguishable.</p>
<p>Bill Clinton–that is a different issue. </p>
<p>Re Hunt #217: Part of the point of my post #171 is that Martin Karplus, Bill Gates, and Steven Ballmer were all in the <em>same</em> stack when it came to Harvard admissions–the stack of applicants who are super-qualified on academic grounds.</p>
<p>I agree with CCDD14 #215 that the SAT is not a very good means of figuring out who belongs in the stack of applicants who are super-qualified on academic grounds (these days anyway), because the ceiling is really quite low on it. It appears to be possible to score quite well on the SAT (starting from a not-so-hot score) by dint of more effort than most people would think it is sensible to put in. That is not to say that the majority of people who do score quite well put in a lot of effort–some of them put in no more effort than registering and showing up for the test.</p>
<p>But coming back to Hunt #217, and taking the question totally on face value, though paragraph 1 on this post gives my true opinion: I think the 1 of Bill Gates vs. 10 of Martin Karplus analysis would differentiate Harvard from Cambridge pretty well. My guess is that Harvard goes with Bill Gates (they want the alumni donations), and Cambridge goes with 10 of Martin Karplus. Perhaps this is anti-Harvard calumny, or perhaps it is obvious. Interestingly, Gates has given quite a lot of money to Cambridge, which he never attended (to the best of my knowledge). The donation to Cambridge to establish the Gates-Cambridge scholarships is described below:</p>
<p>“The programme was established in 2000 by a donation of US$210m from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the University of Cambridge; this is the largest ever single donation to a UK university.” </p>
<p><a href=“http://employment.kg/bill-gates-scholarship-at-university-of-cambridge-in-uk-201516/”>http://employment.kg/bill-gates-scholarship-at-university-of-cambridge-in-uk-201516/</a> </p>
<p>When we look back, knowing what we know now ,did Gates derive any benefit from Harvard? He didn’t stay. I like the cui bono question thinking about Gates and Harvard and society. </p>
<p>I’m still not entirely convinced computers are a good for mankind.</p>
<p>I didn’t intend it to be a difficult question at all. To me, it’s obvious that any university in America would trade 10 (or maybe a hundred) potential Nobel-prize-winning chemists for a single world-changing individual like Bill Gates, or a world leader like Bill Clinton. Somebody or other wins the Nobel prize in Chemistry every year–that’s not exactly a dime a dozen, but they are a lot more common than somebody like Gates or Clinton.</p>
<p>The interesting question is whether they really would be in the same “stack.” Would you really get Bill Gates if you just looked at academic achievements? Maybe–I don’t know enough about him to say. I don’t think you’d get Bill Clinton, though. Also, I have to say that I’m somewhat biased by the fact that I never heard of Martin Karplus until I read this thread. How important can he really be? He’s less famous than Kim Kardashian.</p>
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<p>What if Kim Kardashian was in your stack?</p>
<p>I honestly have no idea which stack Hunt’s picking (if he gets to do the picking and not “Harvard”) and what reasoning he’s going to use. Sometimes I think Hunt is one of those rare birds who doesn’t necessarily have an opinion on everything? </p>
<p>Channeling Baba Wawa, If Hunt were a bird, what kind of a bird would he be?</p>
<p>I haven’t found much yet that I don’t have an opinion on. In this case, my reasoning is that Harvard (and similar colleges) wants more than anything else to enroll and graduate people who will be world-changing leaders. So while they’d love to have lots of Nobel prize-winners, I think they believe their admissions process is designed to get them AND the world-changing leaders. Now, maybe it’s true that they’d get just as many world-changing leaders if they just looked at academic achievements, but I don’t believe that–and obviously, neither do they. They’ve had a pretty good track record at finding the leaders. (Yale’s done pretty well too–indeed, some “gentleman’s C” type students have gone on to pretty important positions.)</p>
<p>Did anybody else watch the PBS show about the Roosevelts last night? Teddy Roosevelt would have been a model Harvard admit and student even today.</p>
<p>Hunt, #231, Bill Gates had a 1590/1600 on the SAT, back when that was harder to do (pre re-centering). I think that in post #171, I quoted some wikipedia material about Gates’ solving a “pancake stacking problem” in computation, with a method that was the fastest available for 30 years. He did this as a Harvard sophomore. I am sure that he showed signs of that same level of intellect in high school, aside from his SAT score.</p>
<p>And let’s see . . . Kim Kardashian vs. Martin Karplus. Hmmm, hmmm. If Martin reads this, he’s howling with laughter right now.</p>
<p>But did Bill Gates also have perfect grades? Maybe he did, I don’t know.</p>
<p>You might get Bill Clinton in the stack who are qualified on academic grounds, if you adjusted for the schools in Arkansas at the time (and in the place) that he attended them. He has a prodigious memory.</p>
<p>I saw the PBS show about the Roosevelts, and thought it was fascinating. I did not expect to hear on television that “Theodore Roosevelt was a killer.” I have generally admired TR. But the comment about his leading his men up San Juan hill “like sheep to the slaughter” and the losses of his unit gave me considerable pause.</p>
<p>I didn’t see it, but if any one person is to blame or thank for the outsize importance of college athletics in America it is TR. Harvard stadium was the largest concrete structure in the world when it was built in 1903 for football. In 1905 there were several deaths in football and as a sport it might have died ( Charles Eliot, president of Harvard was leading the charge) were it not for TR getting Yale’s Walter Camp and the main coaches of the day to the WhiteHouse for a discussion of how to change the rules to make it safer and thereby continue to use the stadium just built by the class of 1879. So you can blame a guy on Mt Rushmore for the continued college admissions office focus on non academic skills as well as academic skills. </p>