From an earlier post . . .
200+ for just one award. And the laundry list of “prestigious awards” which supposedly offer a leg up is huge, and covers a wide variety of artistic and academic subjects. If the number of such contests is in the hundreds, then the number of honorees is likely to be in the thousands, is it not?
No, not all 200+ get the same math award. There’re different levels of accomplishment. The highest honor is a medal (gold, silver, or bronze) in IMO. The next highest honor is being on the USA team (only 6 members). The rest are just qualfiers at various levels. The only other HS Olympiads that are given nearly the same weight is IPhO and IOI/USACO. And those two have far fewer participants (USACO may be catching up due to the popularity of CS at the moment).
You’ll have to take that up with @hebegebe. He believes that 270 kids from this competition are at Level 8 on the “prestigious awards” scale, meaning “Amazing accomplishment; Large boost.” And there are dozens of contests at this level or higher, and many of them honor 100 kids or more. To mention just a few examples . . . Gold Key winners in writing or art; selection to National Band and Orchestra, participation in National Boys State, and team member of Top 32 team at the International Public Policy forum debate. That’s a whole lotta kids right there.
These are all great accomplishments that any parent would be proud of, but the accomplishments aren’t offering the kind of admissions boosts that is being suggested. There are just too many kids and too few spots.
There are probably about 25 students that are at Level 10. There are no more than 200 at level 9. Maybe 1500 at level 8.
How many spots are there at HYPSM?
P.S. Additionally, huge percentage of the people at level 10 have accomplishments at level 9. Same for levels 9 and 8. So the total of students 10+9+8 is not much higher than 1500.
Not sure about your numbers. One award I am familiar with, level 7 Congressional Gold Award, has at least 500 awardees annually, for just that one award
Where in my post did I give estimates for level 7?
Oh, he loves math. It’s why he decided to study one of the mathiest engineering fields. He gets it deeply and has never, ever seen it as drudgery. That said, ski powder in Japan, or sit in his room and do math for fun, Japan wins every time. You can find math fun and enjoyable, like he does, and still prefer to do other things.
More than that. I think @hebegebe’s point though is that if you look beneath the covers, there are some things that aren’t completely random that help differentiate candidates.
First of all, not everyone gets the same admission boost. At the tippy tops, only the highest levels of accomplishment get significant boost. Others may get some boost when viewed in the context of their other accomplishments. At colleges a level or two below, more applicants (some with lower levels of accomplishments in these competitions) may get a significant boost, and so on.
DI athletes are included in Level 1, so there are many more than 25.
Have you added up the totals for Levels 8 and 9, or are you just estimating? Either way my estimate of hundreds or thousands supposedly getting a substantial boost seems accurate, especially when one considers that the boosts supposedly extend below Level 8. For example, Level 5 “will compliment already-strong record,” so according to this prestigious awards scale, how many kids are getting more of a boost that that?
According to an earlier poster there are 7400 spots.
I have no idea how many D1 athletes apply to HYPSM, so I didn’t include them in my guesstimate (I should have mentioned that). There are probably 10 medalists from International Olympiads, Top 10 STS finalists, 3 ISEF, etc. I guess my guesstimate was low, maybe 30-35 total.
For Level 9 I didn’t add the totals, I guesstimated. There are 40 STS finalists, about 10 ISEF Best of Category, about 50 RSI participants, which leaves about a 100 for the rest. If you have better estimate, or you want to count them, feel free to share them with us.
The post mentions boosts at level 7 for universities other than HYPSM.
I agree.
But Harvard’s category 1 “possible national-level achievement” numbers probably provide a much cleaner guide to what they consider truly exceptional than these laundry lists of supposed competition “tickets” to the top schools:
~75 applicants per year, ~50% admitted. So less than 40 kids.
That’s not a lot of spots. And below that the number of applicants skyrockets and the odds of admission diminishes greatly. Which is my point. It is great to be accepted, but those accepted aren’t necessarily any more “excellent” than thousands who were rejected.
Given that most seem to agree no one “deserves” a spot at these schools, I am not sure why people are so reluctant to apply that observation to those who were accepted in addition to those who were rejected.
Except for the MIT kids (MIT is D3) all of the athletes at these schools are D1. But I think MIT recruits athletes as well, so I’m not sure it should be excluded. I don’t know the amount either, but with or without MIT that’s a lot of athletes.
As for the numbers, thanks. I’ve no interest in counting so I’ll gladly take your word for it. By your estimates it seems like, in the top three levels, there are 1750+ students. (That’s excluding the athletes.)
Yet there are <40 students admitted to Harvard in the national level-achievement pool, and I doubt that all 40 were from these contests. Kids of extraordinary talent don’t always devote their lives to competitions, yet some still find a way shine.
The competitions and other measurable accomplishments do give you a boost in admission. In geographical areas where other kids have them, they are an almost required but not sufficient condition for admission. Colleges want the best kids ranked by an objective measure, and the competitions provide that measure. My daughter, who is not a STEM kid, was not only the EIC of the school newspaper but the newspaper got several regional and even a national award (at journalistic competition). She also had 5 Gold and 2 Silver Scholastic keys for writing, won a few regional writing competitions, etc.
This is how she got into a minor IVY school (which she chose to not attend) without any hooks.
Of course, she did not do these activities to get into college. She truly enjoyed writing ever since elementary school.
USAMO is an interesting award in that, unlike most other awards, it makes no judgment about a student’s GPA, other ECs, character, recommendations, etc. A student gets it or not based upon a set of objective tests. And yet, about 80% got into at least one HYPSM.
Now most of the kids I knew that got this qualification shined in other areas. Most of them were nice kids, excellent students, had other ECs, etc. Some, but certainly not a majority, had a Level 9 award as well. So for the ones that didn’t, were they admitted just because of USAMO? My belief is that it is a distinguishing feature that makes it easy for an admission committee to choose one strong student over another.
On the flip side, one of the students who didn’t get into a HYPSM had middling grades and was well known as “the obnoxious kid”. But he still ended up in CS at Carnegie Mellon, which itself has a single digit admit rate. Sample size of 1, but an interesting one.
As a counterpoint, when the Level 9 award came out, most of the kids who had applied to Yale got likely letters within two weeks and were invited to Yale Engineering and Science Weekend. And every one who had applied to Columbia (>7 if I recall) got likely letters very soon as well.
But if you want to continue to think that this all happened at random, feel free.
It is likely a lot more obvious what differentiates applicants when one is an insider in the college’s admission office who can see the entire applicant pool (or a large portion of it at least), compared to most people here and elsewhere who are outsiders (including most applicants and their parents, counselors, and teachers) and can see only a very limited portion of the applicant pool (e.g. one or a few applicants, mostly or all from the same high school).
Remember that most outsiders (including posters here) tend to look mostly at basic stats, but those are generally near the ceiling for applicants who have a chance; the applicant characteristics beyond basic stats are much hard for outsiders to know how they compare with the full applicant pools (and some characteristics like recommendations are basically invisible to most, including often the applicant).
I can only speak for Brown, and only the small subset of people that I happen to know, but most of us didn’t do academic competitions to get into college, and now that we’re here, I don’t think I’ve heard anyone mention any of these competitions.
Just a few other thoughts on this thread from the perspective of a current Brown student: we don’t say “IVY” like it’s an acronym. There’s no such thing as a “minor IVY,” since the ivy league is a) just a sports conference and b) every ivy league school is different. A few of my friends qualified for USAMO, and only one is pursuing a pure math concentration–they definitely have different interests. I know Brown rejects 73% of applicants with an ACT score of 36, so I would be interested to know how they value score-based academic competitions.
Frankly, I don’t believe these statistics without a reference to the source.
I don’t know where you are getting these figures (“80%” of 270 honorees got admitted to HYPSM) or how the numbers are verified, or what the other factors are. And maybe I am misremembering but I thought you had indicated that these were just your estimates based on your observations. Either way, I can’t comment much without verifiable data. Bully for these kids, though.
As for verifiable data, we have the Harvard numbers, and they seem to suggest that far fewer kids are getting their tickets stamped by these national competitions than you seem to believe.
More importantly, I don’t believe that the admissions process is “random.” It isn’t. See recruits and legacies, for example.
The admissions process is by design. It just isn’t designed to effectively cull the truly “excellent” students from the mass of students who, in your words, “aim higher than they should.” There are too many variables and the schools have too many other interests (practical, historical, financial, etc.) So thousands of truly excellent students end up outside looking in, for reasons that have little or nothing to do with any sort of objective standard.
In short, there are just way more truly excellent students than these universities can take.
That doesn’t seem like it should be a controversial statement, but maybe I am missing something . . .
Do you really think that bottom half of the class at these schools is more academically “excellent” than the top rejected kids who end up excelling at UCLA, Vanderbilt, Duke, Northwestern, etc?
Knowing plenty of kids from both groups, I certainly don’t.
You can view the number of applicant and admit rate for ratings in different categories at http://samv91khoyt2i553a2t1s05i-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Doc-415-Arcidiacono-Dec-1.pdf .
Note that these ratings are a shorthand, and there are a variety of ways a reader may classify an an applicant. It’s a not a simple all national award winners receive a 1 in EC, and nobody else receives a 1. A student who receives a national level recognition in an EC might be classified as a 2+ rather than a 1 for a variety of reasons. If there is corresponding academic strength beyond just out-of-classroom activities, he/she might be labeled as 1 academic rather than 1 EC (~110 applicants per year received 1 academic rating). I expect a large portion of 1 ECs/Academics also have nothing to do with national awards.
It’s also quite possible for students who win national level awards to not apply to Harvard. I did math teams/contests as a kid, although nothing beyond regional level; yet I did not apply to Harvard. I was interested in engineering, and at the time Harvard was relatively weak in engineering. Many engineering subfields were almost non-existent. My math team friends also didn’t mention Harvard when discussing colleges and applications.