<p>The large organization thought is instructive here, though perhaps not quite in the way people are thinking. Adcoms are basically HR – and they undoubtedly work long and hard to fill the intake of their organization with the best people, based on their understanding of what the organization is looking for. And just as surely, the faculty (think law firm partner egos plus tenure) think they could do a better job, if only they had enough time or cared enough to do the job themselves.</p>
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<p>I have plenty of experience with how universities are run, starting from when I was an undergrad and started following how the drinking death at MIT was dealt with. Both QM and I have current info on what is going on at MIT as well.</p>
<p>The primary focus of the university administration is to raise money. In some other areas, it seemed like there needed to be a national scandal in order for the administration to pay attention. Undoubtedly, the administration was involved in the decision to promote Marilee Jones. However, I don’t know if they hired her because of her great track record for recruiting women and minorities to apply or for her other philosophies.</p>
<p>When i was in high school i had no idea what the high school addministration was doing. This is the way it should be. At MIT, with all the scandals, it became hard to ignore and I started to pay attention.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, I have not been back in contact with the MIT faculty I know since X was an MIT sophomore. I thought I’d wait to see how things turned out–whether I was right, or whether it made sense for X to be a very last minute marginal admit. Until the last few years, I haven’t had the hard evidence based on X’s performance at MIT, that I was indeed right in my assessment. However, X is a grad student at MIT now, and might not thank me for roiling the scene. I am not sure.</p>
<p>It does not stand to reason that I know the only very well-qualified student that MIT waitlisted or rejected. Strangely, I know 2 of the 20 students who were admitted from MIT’s waitlist in that year. What are the odds of that?</p>
<p>Re the statement by lookingforward that I might think that X should have won the Intel competition: I am really not saying that at all. That is a rather singular accomplishment. It would be very hard to claim that one knew the best of the best.</p>
<p>Could I have claimed that X would be among the 20 students MIT would be happiest to have admitted? When X was a high-school senior, I don’t think so. Could I have claimed that X would be among the 100 students MIT would be happiest to have admitted? I do think so. Given the number of students that MIT did admit, it just doesn’t stand to reason that X was on the edge.</p>
<p>Obviously, I did not hear the admissions deliberations, and don’t know what went into the mix. This was not a case of “another textureless Korean math grind,” though.</p>
<p>Your perspective is limited. Like saying you get what Microsoft is up to because you use its programs.</p>
<p>As a friend of mine used to observe to me, “I knew you when you were nuthin’.”
I have been in science for a long time. Correspondingly, I have had a long time to observe young scientists, some of whom were educated alongside me and some who followed. I’ve spent 1+ years at each of several “top” universities, before moving out to Hilbert space and then subsequently on sabbaticals. I have a fairly good picture of the range of talent that’s out there, even though my sample does not include all MIT applicants in any given cohort.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t claim that I could identify the next business mogul for Harvard, nor the Secretary of State for 2032, although I know a few people who have done quite well in business or in Washington, DC. Those are outside my range of expertise. Physical science is pretty solidly inside it.</p>
<p>^I have no where near as much experience as ** QuantMech**, but as someone once said “I know it when I see it.” And getting to where I am has been an exercise in humility as I learned that I was “not it” :).</p>
<p>“I have plenty of experience with how universities are run, starting from when I was an undergrad and started following how the drinking death at MIT was dealt with” </p>
<p>ROFL!
So, do you think that MIT’s mission is only to admit brilliant students as measured by how you and QM define brilliance – that the whole university is fully aligned, but those out-of-control adcoms are just going rogue and no one can stop them?</p>
<p>Why don’t you invite MITChris onto this conversation?</p>
<p>“Could I have claimed that X would be among the 20 students MIT would be happiest to have admitted? When X was a high-school senior, I don’t think so. Could I have claimed that X would be among the 100 students MIT would be happiest to have admitted? I do think so.”</p>
<p>I think the concept of “students that a school is more happy to have admitted” is an odd one. Who the heck knows which of the 2000 incoming freshmen will go on to do great things?</p>
<p>Q, we cross posted. My comment was to CA.<br>
I don’t doubt your ability to judge science abilities. I’m saying your view is not the entire perspective in what adcoms seek. Your knowledge of how they process, the competition & constraints, is limited.
Calling him a last minute marginal admit is framing it negatively. Marginal? Whoa. He was an alternate or a reserve. Not a loser they begrudgingly dredged from the bottom of the barrel. Clearly, they saw his potential.</p>
<p>Quant mech- your perspective is indeed limited and the more you protest otherwise, the greater the gap between institutional reality/priorities and your own POV on how MIT should operate becomes.</p>
<p>MIT needs students who will major in linguistics and economics and political science and urban planning; just because you have insight into the depth and breadth of the pool of physical scientists does not mean you have insight into how MIT needs to construct its class. (which others far more eloquent than I have tried to point out to you on this and other threads.) If over the course of the last 15 years, we can all figure out only 2-3 or 8-9 kids who should have been admitted to MIT upfront but were either waitlisted or inexplicably rejected… then MIT is doing a far better job with its admissions overall than virtually any other selection/gatekeeping apparatus anywhere else in the world.</p>
<p>Better than the Green Berets. Better than the CIA. Better than Interpol, Mossad, and certainly better than Harvard, Princeton, and Yale.</p>
<p>Off the top of my head I can name you 20 kids who “should have” been admitted to Harvard but were denied and ended up having to choose between Yale and Princeton. Etc. If the collective wisdom here going back a decade can only come up with a few examples- using your criteria (certainly not mine since I think MIT has a much broader mission than accepting the folks you think should be admitted) then the adcom’s at MIT deserve a big round of applause.</p>
<p>Nobody at MIT (or anywhere else) has ever claimed that they have perfect insight into the heart and soul and intellect of a 17 year old kid. Nobody at MIT (or anywhere else) has ever said that every kid they admit walks on water. But MIT would be an institution that very few kids would want to attend were it not for the poets and the musicians and the debate champions and the tinkerers who make the place so much fun. YOU think the poet should be rejected in favor of one more uber-academic superstar. And most of the time- unless the poet is also an uber-academic superstar- that is indeed what happens. But if every once in a while, the kid YOU think should be an auto-admit gets waitlisted- I think the process is working pretty well just as it is.</p>
<p>I know MIT faculty who work with admissions-- so I’m not sure where your image of an admissions process divorced from the institutional priorities has come from. Not every faculty member; perhaps not in your discipline. But if Electrical Engineering and the faculty in the Media Lab have a profile which doesn’t match up with what YOU think they should be admitting- then the kids who don’t make it will suffer through their educations at the dozens of schools who will be vying for them. Not enough seats for everyone they’d love to have.</p>
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<p>MIT adcoms have always claimed not to consider major in admissions; they have faith that there will be plenty of people to fill the ranks in all the majors, and if not, it’s not a big deal. (In the latter case, MIT had an ocean engineering major that went without undergrads for years, maybe even decades; I assume they only cared about having grad students.) In practice, a lot of kids who say they are going to major in math/physics end up in majors like economics or material science, so the policy makes sense.</p>
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<p>Maybe, maybe not. I’d say verbal ability (demonstrated by ability in debate and/or writing) and an artistic sense add a dimension to a candidate that helps them be a better scientist. I don’t subscribe to the Gardneresque view that these abilities are all separate.</p>
<p>There are even arguments for having athletics be a factor. I would bet that Stu Schmill, a former coxswain, believes that athletes have more energy, and that this translates to technical fields. There are other abilities as well that are linked to athletic success. It all depends, though, on whether your purpose is to field great teams or to get people whose abilities you think will translate to success in technical fields. I am not sure where the emphasis is, though I suspect it is somewhat in between.</p>
<p>I understand that MIT is looking for diversity of intellectual interests. I also understand how important the biological sciences are, and how rapidly they are developing.</p>
<p>Does MIT have literature majors? I don’t know. Actually, I think a poet would be fairly miserable at MIT, unless the poet was very unusual.</p>
<p>Perhaps the one or two cases of students that I know personally are unique. It would be odd for me to think that, though. I don’t know how many students would not post about a rejection on CC–probably quite a few.</p>
<p>MIT admits a number of students who fail the freshman physics course and/or the freshman math course. Others have claimed that these are smart students who just didn’t settle in to work soon enough. Regardless, I think there was something wrong with the process that led to this. I sincerely do not believe that these students all came from similar demographic groups.</p>
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<p>One in-law did a double-major in a natural sciences field and literature at MIT sometime in the '80s. However, it’s offered under the “Humanities” major. </p>
<p>As with all majors…including exclusively “Humanities” majors, she also had to take much more advanced math courses to complete her core requirements than more Arts & Sciences centered peer institutions. </p>
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<li>They half-jokingly encouraged me to apply there as a history major so I’d be around to hang out with. While the history department there was decent…it was still too limited</li>
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<p>Every college has some kids who have some initial adjustments. Bright kids. Just as very bright premeds can struggle at times. And eventually get to great med pgms. They don’t give up, do succeed. But what’s this about “similar demographic groups?” A veiled comment?</p>
<p>No! It’s not a veiled comment! I support affirmative action! I do not believe that the people failing the introductory courses are all URM’s! That would make no sense at all! Also, if the weak students belonged to an identifiable set of demographic groups, my faculty friends would never have raised the issue at all. I think that there are many white males in the set of people failing those courses. No? I think admissions could have done better.</p>
<p>All things considered, what perfect world? This thread has become a crazy moving target. Have whatever standards you want but make sure to include reality checks. As I tell my kids and have said on CC before, don’t fall into "I think it, so it must be true. "</p>
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<p>Well, thank you for the first sentence. Fwiw, I am always happy to agree to disagree, but I am far more interested in trying to learn from the “opposite” view and turn black and white positions into shades of grey. </p>
<p>As far as blind spots, or weak spots, I admit to be influenced by my opinion that the focus of undergraduate education should be on teaching versus research. An opinion that seems to be supported by the success of the LAC model. That opinion is hardly imcompatible with acknowledging the important role of research in academia, or imcompatible with an opinion that we have allowed the pendulum to swing way too far in the lacking focus on undergraduates. My main beef is not that research does exist to the extent it does today, but that some pretend that the model that protects the research divas is beneficial at the undergraduate level. </p>
<p>As far as failing to place a critical eye on admissions, I offer my opinions. Sometimes they can be educated, and other times entirely speculative, as I do not participate in the process … anywhere. I try to observe and make sense of the process. Just like everyone else here. :)</p>
<p>My grandfather was a poet who went to MIT. Majored in architecture wrote silly poems about science. They are still in print BTW. He started at Harvard, but was asked to leave - we think he flunked out, but it’s a deep dark secret.</p>
<p>Just like Harvard tries to get a couple of hundred pure intellects who don’t necessarily have anything outside scholarship going for them, I suspect MIT has places for this type as well. There are a lot of us who think during the Marillee Jones era it’s possible the institution may have forgotten that part of the mission (or at least what we think the mission should have been.)</p>
<p>I’ve long since reconciled myself to the fact that my son ended up extremely happy in a school that was full of MIT rejects (I think 90% of his class raised their hands when asked by the Dean - he gave the opening talk at the Computer Science School about the trials and advantages of being judged second best. When it comes right down to it, my son is very happy being a very smart cog in a big company, but I don’t think he has the ambition to make MIT famous for contributions in his field. MIT didn’t accept anyone from our high school the year my son applied. One girl was waitlisted and ended up going to Caltech.</p>
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<p>Maybe there’s something wrong with the professors, who can’t teach clearly enough to make physics understandable to a bunch of bright students. Maybe there’s a “hazing” component – make the class SO hard that x% will fail – at MIT that shouldn’t exist there.</p>