<p>Virtual green dot to HImom for nicely bringing us back.</p>
<p>For some reason Physics seems to be a subject very hard to grasp or be taught. If one reads any of the parents forums, the biggest gripe after Math is Physics but the people griping about physics are complaining about the teachers in high schools and how their kids who do well in just about everything don’t seem to in Physics.</p>
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<p>Giving an applicant a boost for a given level of achievement coming out of a disadvantaged background could arguably be a way of finding additional merit. Of course, the amount of the boost may be tricky to determine (and varies individually by applicant), since there may be a fine line between finding additional merit (i.e. admitting better students than if consideration of disadvantaged backgrounds were not considered) and admitting students with too high a risk of failure at the school (if the boost is too much). Or (more likely) there is a broader line between these two situations, as there is for other types of preferred classes (e.g. athlete, or legacy, although the legacy case is very hard to make an argument that there is additional academic merit there, though the school may benefit from more alumni donations in return), but then people speculate and argue about the fairness issues.</p>
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Physics takes Work.</p>
<p>Heh…heh…(Sylvan runs snickering to her corner)…</p>
<p>I keep a small flame of hope alive that someday Pizzagirl will say, “Oh! Hey! I guess your special snowflake was special after all! Your special snowflake is ice-9 and melts at 114.4 degrees Fahrenheit!” Maybe after the Nobel Prizes are awarded in 2058 . . .</p>
<p>I am curious–roughly how many people do fail freshman physics at MIT the first time around? How many do other people on this forum think should fail (by which I mean–how many do you think it is acceptable to see fail)?</p>
<p>I think that MIT admissions takes some students when they can predict that the odds of the student’s failing physics the first time through are greater than 50%, based on high school background and standardized test scores. </p>
<p>I don’t argue that they should not take those students, necessarily–there could be very good arguments for taking them, and some of the students may develop into excellent engineers of scientists, when given the educational opportunity to flourish.</p>
<p>However, if I ran MIT admissions, and knew that I was admitting students who weren’t up to the right level for the introductory physics course, I would talk to the faculty in physics about setting up a prep course, ahead of the first semester.</p>
<p>I like Chicago’s approach–I think it might be a bit too short, though; but perhaps they also have transitional courses within the university. Is it still the case that all the students at Chicago have to take calculus?</p>
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<p>I don’t think winning the Nobel Prize would be enough.</p>
<p>I need to intervene on Pizza’s behalf, not that she can’t speak for herself.</p>
<p>Nobody is dissing snowflake; nobody is claiming that snowflake isn’t talented and destined for greatness (even a Nobel). What Pizza is saying is that getting waitlisted at MIT is insufficient evidence that snowflakes greatness was misunderstood or underestimated.</p>
<p>Every year people get Nobel prizes in a variety of disciplines who were rejected from SOMETHING in their lives previously. People win prizes in econ who did not get into their first choice doctoral program. People win prizes in medicine who felt shafted on match day, or attended their “safety school” as undergrads.</p>
<p>MIT does not claim to be able to predict who will win a Nobel prize- not their mission. MIT does not claim to be able to predict who will go one to shame their admissions department by having been denied at the tender age of 17 or 18 but then 30 years later (or 15 or 10) prove them to be morons by achieving greatness.</p>
<p>All the adcom’s claim to be doing is to select a class which more or less fulfills the institutional priorities/mission of the university period full stop. And if you don’t agree with their mission or priorities, and think they are rounding out the class with a bunch of morons who can’t even pass Freshman Physics there is a simple solution- don’t apply and tell your kids not to apply.</p>
<p>Simple solution. And then you can wait for the announcements from Stockholm every year with schadenfreude and joy.</p>
<p>Um, well, I think the intent of Pizzagirl’s “special snowflake” metaphor was to say that the snowflake, while different from all other snowflakes, was not so special after all.</p>
<p>I think MIT admissions had some problems when headed by Marilee Jones. lookingforward has said that admissions is hardly a fiefdom–I understand that, but I think that Jones was well on her way to becoming a media celeb if not a rock star. I have to admit that at the moment, I can’t tell you the name of the Director of Admissions at my university without looking it up.</p>
<p>If you conducted a close reading of the MIT site in the era when Marilee Jones was in charge, I think you could detect a level of distaste for the 2400 SAT I, 2400 SAT II applicants. In my opinion, this skewed their judgment. See if you can locate comments on the MIT admissions web site by “Momchil” by looking at cached material. I think none of it is accessible through the current MIT portal.</p>
<p>I understand that admissions has a very hard job. Their first goal has to be to hit the target number of admits quite closely, with a large majority who can do the work. I think that sometimes, they have to match the number of openings in the freshman class with error no greater than the square root of the number of admits. That’s pretty hard to do, because there must be uncertainties in the yield–and quite a few of the top schools take no one from the waitlist in certain years. I wouldn’t like to have the responsibility of admissions at a top school.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I don’t understand why my viewpoint is caricatured as saying that they are admitting “morons.” I am saying that they admit people who fail freshman physics. This seems to be a fact. Some of the failures were probably predictable based on student background–in those cases, I think that MIT should be offering an alternative course, rather than throwing every one of those students into the hopper with students who have 800 SAT M, 800 SAT II Physics, and a good high school physics course. “Fail first, then regroup” doesn’t seem like a good plan to me.</p>
<p>I applied to MIT eons ago and was admitted. Went elsewhere for financial reasons. No one else in my extended family has been interested in MIT.</p>
<p>Predicting who will win a Nobel Prize might not be MIT’s “mission,” but educating future Nobelists probably is part of the mission. I think that any department would be chagrined that the institution turned down a future Nobel Laureate, actually. Denison University probably is still kicking the ghosts of their former department chair and dean that they turned down Albert Einstein for a faculty position.</p>
<p>Addendum: Schadenfreude is a rather low emotion, which I hope I may have gone beyond. (I am approximately “as old as dirt.” That helps.)</p>
<p>Educating future Nobelists is part of the mission of any research university-- but not as a conscientious “we’re so smart we can predict who out of an extraordinary cohort of applicants, will become truly extraordinary as opposed to merely extraordinary” kind of way.</p>
<p>Learning to fail forward is probably the most important predictor of having a stellar career in a discipline for which there is a Nobel. Getting waitlisted at MIT is small potatoes in the world of frustrating scientific endeavor.</p>
<p>I am not caricaturing your viewpoint. I knew dozens of perfect scoring SAT/SAT 2 students admitted to MIT during the Jones era (and since I saw detailed admissions data from my own kids HS during those years know exactly who was unhooked (all of them) vis a vis ethnicity or geography (urban Northeast). It is just a canard that MIT rejected boat loads of perfect scoring kids in favor of the ones who can’t pass freshman physics. MIT always told its applicants that there was no such thing as an auto-admit- not perfect scores, not RSI, not Intel, not physics olympiad.</p>
<p>My son’s year the admit rate for single sitting perfect scorers was over 65% but under 70%. So yes- much better odds than for the pool at large, but not perfect, and I’ve got to believe that at least some of those kids ended up doing great things at Cal Tech or Princeton and are not sitting on a sidewalk holding a sign “MIT reject”.</p>
<p>You are stirring this pot longer than needed, Q. </p>
<p>You referred to him as a marginal admit. Your peers at MIT can tell you how many flunk better than one of us can Google. You don’t know their admit policies and between you and CA, feel the voice of MIT misrepresents. Most of us don’t dwell on Jones. Current admissions is more than stats. And it’s MIT. Not CAT, QMT, PGT or LFT.</p>
<p>Caltech bookstore sells T-shirts which say MIT on the front and " because not everyone can goto Caltech" on the back.</p>
<p>A couple of questions that might be relevant to the divergence of opinion: For a student who is near the top of the MIT group, do you think that the education MIT offers is better than that at a strong state flagship, or no different? For a student in the middle of the MIT group? For a student in the bottom 10% of the MIT group, who is lucky (or maybe unlucky) to be there?</p>
<p>Hmm, QMT, might open that.</p>
<p>blossom, in post #549, you wrote “If you think . . . they are rounding out the class with a bunch of morons who can’t even pass Freshman Physics . . .” That seems like a caricature of my viewpoint to me.</p>
<p>lookingforward #553, remarks that I referred to the student as a “marginal admit.” I meant in terms of MIT’s actions. How would you characterize someone who is admitted at the margin–among the last 20 to be admitted, and that only because MIT went to the waitlist that year unlike the practice in previous years. I think that the students who remained on the waitlist were “marginal declines” operationally.</p>
<p>Perhaps a lot of the difference in opinions arises because I would like to see an optimal or near-optimal match between the admitted students and what MIT has to offer that’s different from what Berkeley, UNC Chapel Hill, or the University of Michigan has to offer. (If there is any difference.)</p>
<p>At least at one point in the past MIT professors did complain about admissions-
[Test</a> scores rise in response to concerns - The Tech](<a href=“http://tech.mit.edu/V109/N62/scores.00n.html]Test”>http://tech.mit.edu/V109/N62/scores.00n.html)</p>
<p>Some arguments are never-ending.</p>
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<p>How can “optimal match” be determined with admittedly limited information about the applicants? Indeed, even the applicants do not necessarily accurately predict their optimal matches, as evidenced by students wanting to transfer from their four year schools to other four year schools due to various fit issues. Also, unless the student is very picky, there are likely plenty of schools that are good or acceptable fits, even if they are not the “optimal match”.</p>
<p>It may also be the case that the number of college freshmen whose optimal match school is MIT is significantly larger or smaller than the size of MIT’s freshman class.</p>
<p>Of course, what is the optimal match for the students may not be what the school thinks is an optimal match for itself, where various non-academic priorities can come into play.</p>
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<p>If merit is equated with potential, there is an argument for giving a boost to the so-called privileged, since the child may have inherited traits from the parents that are not reflected fully reflected in conventional measures. Suppose you were choosing between two “perfect” applicants (straight A averages, 2400 SATs), one from a middle class family (say a policeman married to a nurse) and another from an upper-class academic one (a Nobel laureate professor married to another professor). The second student likely had a somewhat better environment, but he may also have inherited intellectual curiosity and ambition from his parents that will lead him to get even more out of attending an elite research university than the middle class kid.</p>
<p>If the arguments for boosting the disadvantaged and the advantaged are both plausible, one can compromise by not boosting either group. College Board studies have found that low-income students earn slightly lower grades than their SATs would predict, suggesting that objective measures do not understate their academic potential.</p>