<p>I direct my comments towards your own edit. My “ignorance” of students of high caliber? Gee, thanks. My knowledge of students of high caliber COMES from being an admissions blogger and getting comments and emails from them on a daily basis, and from going to a competitive magnet school full of such students. (Maybe I was one of them, maybe not.)</p>
<p>I’m not saying that “the pursuit of intelligent and independent learning eclipses a natural lifestyle,” I’m saying that obsessively studying for one exam and obsessing over one B- on your transcript eclipses a natural lifestyle.</p>
<p>“After such, you can’t say that because a person is spending more time studying for the SAT or whatnot, they drop all of those things that they love. I cannot agree that it is necessarily a problem at all.”
We can agree to disagree on this point. It most certainly happens, and I have seen it, precisely because of the “experience” of high learning that you assumed I did not have (an assumption you made for no reason other to make a rather nasty and insulting point which would have had no basis in fact or logic, even if it were true).</p>
<p>“I think you might find that there are quite a number of people of either type at MIT, and you should as a mature member of the university at the least accept those people who were like that, and accept those students who ARE like that.”</p>
<p>What Mollie said. There AREN’T people like that. People like that cannot handle MIT without changing their attitudes, at least to some degree. People like that are not admitted to MIT when the admissions officers find an unhealthy degree of perfectionism. They know that those students are going to fall apart once they fail an exam (which they almost certainly will do at some point) and they’d rather give the spot to someone who has an equally competitive SAT score but has shown (through essays, recommendations, etc, not the possibly lower score per se) that they can handle failure.</p>
<p>Also, I’d just like to make one more point that you make a pretty big jump when you say that studying for the SAT is learning.</p>