<p>It is in no way arbitrary.</p>
<p>With so many highly qualified applicants (in some way or another) to the Ivies, places like HYP can pick and choose who they want to admit based on who they feel would add to the school community.</p>
<p>If you’re incredibly intelligent (if intelligence just goes by test scores/GPA) but don’t have a personality that can be seen through your essays or EC’s, you won’t get into these top schools.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>No reasonable business brings in people believing they will fail. I think that adcoms believe that every student they admit is “legitimately positioned to take advantage of the school’s resources”, otherwise why admit them? What we outsiders can’t know is which of the school’s resources any individual applicant is planning on taking advantage of, nor can we fully know what any individual applicant is bringing to the table. </p>
<p>Also, don’t be too quick to dismiss any negative in an application as being too trivial to consider. Faced with a time deadline, a pile of 10,000 high achieving applications and only room to accept 1,000, it’s human nature to start obsessing on negative indicators. After a point, you will start to look for reasons, real or imagined, <em>not</em> to accept someone.</p>
<p>
Well, the top schools do take some students who are just very high scoring/GPA students without a lot more. If a student has 4.0 and a 2400, and just ordinary ECs, I certainly wouldn’t discourage him from applying to top schools–he would just need to apply to a reasonable list with enough reaches, matches and safeties.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I’d hardly ever suggest taking someone with too high a level of arrogance such that it is blinding, Jessie. I was arguing against the premise that people who felt they were deserving of getting into MIT are likely arrogant high-achieving math/science students. I think, though, that <em>most</em> high-achieving high schoolers, actually I’m hard-pressed to think of many exceptions, think a lot more of themselves than they should logically until they get to college. I’ve spoken to high schoolers accepted to good schools who think 4 classes in college sounds “too little” because they handled 6 AP’s in high school – I can think of 4 class schedules that’d be grueling to some of the smartest people. I really don’t think people are fully deflated on average until they get to college. </p>
<p>Believe me, I am disgusted by the trait of arrogance coupled with ignorance, but I don’t think (unless it is blindingly obvious that someone’s arrogant in their application) that this is the basis for most rejections from any top school. I simply refuse to believe it, and I don’t think you do either – more likely is that most rejections of qualified candidates are because better fits for the school goals were found.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Well, I happen to believe the “take advantage of the school’s resources” is most important. The reason being – I am in favor of a slightly “hands-off” policy towards engineering the class’s overall distribution in personalities, etc. I don’t think people are all the same, and I think admitting a class of high-achievers in various areas (e.g. admitting the resident brilliant biologist, along with the resident water polo champion) will lead to an interesting class just because people <em>are different</em> and if you’re not cynical, you’ll also believe people have their own interesting sides. There’s only so much you can do to engineer a class based on an application. Heck, I know star debators in high school who just turned engineers in college and didn’t look at anything close to debate ever again, don’t talk about it anymore, etc.</p>