Harvard Professor Steve Pinker on the Ideal Elite University Admissions System

Parents Forum
621

<p>In the category of what I know now that I wish I had known then - my kid actually had a good chance of being accepted to Oxford or Cambridge, but never had a shot at being accepted to a top 8 university in the US.
Hopefully other parents pondering what happened to their intellectually gifted kid will understand how things work here before entering the process and not scratch their heads and beat themselves up wondering what the heck happened.</p>

622

<p>Oxbridge has one quirk. One can apply to only one of them. </p>

623

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<p>There seems to be a tendency to artificially classify “intellectually gifted” and “all-rounders” into opposite camps. In reality, many kids are both, and HYPSM/Oxbridge know this. </p>

<p>Yes, HYPSM are biased towards intellectually-gifted all-rounders (ideally with leadership traits), while Oxbridge more likely focus on intellectually-gifted who are teachable (personality does seem to play a role!). But at the end of day, it is what inside the package, not the packaging, that gets one into elite colleges on either side of the Pond. </p>

<p>(BTW, the above statement comes from our DD’s experience last year. She was lucky to have the choices of Cambridge and HYPSM. At the end, she chose Y because “it is home” and “I want to have a fuller college experience”.) </p>

624

<p>A recent opinion piece from a Yale student: <a href=“http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2014/10/03/deresiewiczs-irony/[/url]”>http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2014/10/03/deresiewiczs-irony/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;

<p>He may be proof of the strengths of an exam-based system, but admits it did not prepare him well. Worth a read.</p>

625

<p>Interesting brief piece. He notes at the end that he wasn’t prepared to create things, but rather was more geared to respondent behaviour. (Sometimes referred to as knowing or being able to arrive at the right answer.) </p>

626

<p>^ ^</p>

<p>FYI, Nur Eken, the author of the Yale piece is female. You can even find the article uses a feminine pronoun to refer to the author at the very bottom of the article. </p>

627

<p>Every system are prone to unique absurdities…you just have to watch for them and try to correct for them.</p>