<p>Ben Jones (MIT) blogged about this issue and essentially claimed that, if the SATs are above some base level, which he implied was somewhere in the 700s for both CR and M, that's the last they think about SATs for a candidate. If one or both is below that, it's not a disqualification, just an "issue". He specifically said that 750 vs. 800 on the Math SAT makes absolutely no difference in the MIT admissions process, and he was telling applicants to go have a picnic rather than retake the SAT to improve a mid-700s math score.</p>
<p>You can believe him or not, but I think it would have been awfully wanton to publish that if it weren't true. What's more, when decisions get down to the short strokes, and it's a question of picking one of Applicants A, B, or C, it's almost impossible for me to believe that the differences in their SATs are even a subject of discussion, since there would be 50 other more important things to discuss.</p>
<p>People at Yale and Harvard say similar stuff all the time, usually along the lines of "We could admit an entire class of students with 1600 SATs and 4.0 GPAs, but that's not what we care about."</p>
<p>And on the other side of the coin is the HYP (I won't name which) admissions counselor (with years in that position, I might add) who told eldest son that a junior year 2340 should be re-taken in senior year. This was at an on the road visit to our nearby city and I was standing right there when S questioned the rep about his comment that SAT's should always be taken in senior year no matter how well one thinks they did earlier than that. So S put himself through the test again senior year, even though we advised against it. Needless to say, he got the 2400 but was rejected from said school. Turned us off of the school for next son and as MIT is one of his top choices, I will print off Ben Jone's comments for him when he looks up his scores online this time next week.</p>
"The university can fulfill its mission either way."</p>
<p>Anyone who says that is lying at worst, being disingenous at best. Try it out the first time they reject the $20 million donor.
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</p>
<p>Well now we are comparing the stated mission with the unstated mission. Harvard's mission for its undergrad program says nothing about donations, or keeping the alumni happy, or even selecting the best and brightest. The mission statement is all well and fine once a student is admitted, but I would suggest that it is the Harvard's unstated mission statement that is disingenuous with respect to admissions. </p>
<p>
[quote]
Harvard College adheres to the purposes for which the Charter of 1650 was granted: "The advancement of all good literature, arts, and sciences; the advancement and education of youth in all manner of good literature, arts, and sciences; and all other necessary provisions that may conduce to the education of the ... youth of this country...." In brief: Harvard strives to create knowledge, to open the minds of students to that knowledge, and to enable students to take best advantage of their educational opportunities.</p>
<p>To these ends, the College encourages students to respect ideas and their free expression, and to rejoice in discovery and in critical thought; to pursue excellence in a spirit of productive cooperation; and to assume responsibility for the consequences of personal actions. Harvard seeks to identify and to remove restraints on students' full participation, so that individuals may explore their capabilities and interests and may develop their full intellectual and human potential. Education at Harvard should liberate students to explore, to create, to challenge, and to lead. The support the College provides to students is a foundation upon which self-reliance and habits of lifelong learning are built: Harvard expects that the scholarship and collegiality it fosters in its students will lead them in their later lives to advance knowledge, to promote understanding, and to serve society.</p>
<p>Harry R. Lewis
Dean of Harvard College
February 23, 1997
<p>That's really odd. I've never heard anyone say that. Neither of my kids (who, however, have not been admitted to HYP) took SATs their senior year, and most of their friends didn't, either (including several who were admitted to HYP). They were pretty current on HYP-application scuttlebutt, and no one even suggested that to them.</p>
<p>Why won't you name the person? It sounds like he gave this as public advice.</p>
<p>I want to add that I think Schwartz is wrong as a matter of game theory.</p>
<p>Right now, the belief that HYPS admissions decisions are largely rational (if mysterious) functions to limit the number of applications (not that anyone could tell). Since acceptance or rejection embodies a perceived judgment about a candidate's intellectual and moral worth compared to others, the admissions decision creates a risk of stigma, and that functions as a disincentive for students to apply if they think that they will not compare favorably with others in the applicant pool on the intangibles.</p>
<p>If a large percentage of the class were selected at random, two things would happen. First, anyone who met the minimum qualifications to be included in the final lottery would have no disincentive to apply, because there would be no stigma to rejection. So the number of applications would increase, and these extra applications would come mainly from people who self-evaluated as weak compared to the existing pool. Second, admission would no longer confer the same prestige, because there would be no implied judgment that an admitted student (or the class as a whole) was better than anyone else in the lottery. So yield (and applications) of the strongest students would go down, since the perceived benefit of admission went down. Both factors would serve to weaken the resulting class somewhat: more comparatively weak candidates in the pool, and fewer comparatively strong ones either in the pool or enrolling.</p>
<p>Now, HYPS could mitigate that effect by setting the bar for inclusion in the final pool very high, and including not just objective numerical criteria but ECs, recommendations, writing samples, etc., with fine judgments being made about them. But that's essentially the current system, and would do nothing to encourage high school students not to spend hours grooming their resumes and transcripts.</p>
<p>
[quote]
But you will have A college experience, simply one that is absent rowing. Which is unlikely to be an issue for 99% of the student body. And Schwartz's point (again and again and again) is that by eliminating the micromanagement of admission, the OVERALL experience of the student body will be enhanced, because it would be a more robust, intellectually risk-taking, non-careerist cohort (his thesis, not mine, but I do sympathize).
[/quote]
</p>
<p>If the goal is to have A college experience, then all students should apply at random to any of the 3,000 colleges in the US. Isn't it the logic of this assertion?</p>
<p>And the idea that students at Swarthmore or similar colleges are risk-averse and careerist is pure bull. Some are and some aren't. And frankly, it strikes me that prospective econ or pre-med majors are more likely to be risk-averse and careerist than the prospective classics or Indian & Sanskrit major.</p>
<p>JHS: As I mentioned, we thought it was an odd statement also, which was why we had our son privately question the comment after the session. I don't remember the admission officer's name (although I could search through our college search notes and find it, but it's not worth it) and I'd rather not publicly disparage the school for perhaps the thoughts of one of its' many representatives when I have three more going through the admissions process over the next four years.</p>
<p>It will be interesting to see if twenty to thirty years from now our super acheiving, bright kids tell their kids to enjoy life instead of stressing so much - kind of that reverse generational thing that seems to happen in other aspects of life. I am too brain dead right now to get into the meat of this thread's discussion - my bottom line is that I will encourage my kids to do pursue what they enjoy and apply to a mix of "reach, match and safety" schools and see what feels right after all the decisions come in.</p>
<p>"Well now we are comparing the stated mission with the unstated mission. Harvard's mission for its undergrad program says nothing about donations, or keeping the alumni happy, or even selecting the best and brightest."</p>
<p>Amherst's charter from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts states that they will educate "indigent youth of good character". So? What is it, exactly, that you are trying to say?</p>
<p>"Now, HYPS could mitigate that effect by setting the bar for inclusion in the final pool very high, and including not just objective numerical criteria but ECs, recommendations, writing samples, etc., with fine judgments being made about them."</p>
<p>That brings us back to the obsessive behavior of applicants and parents that Schwartz's lottery approach was trying to mitigate. I doubt such mitigation is possible through a lottery, because, as one poster pointed out, not only is there a flat maximum, but there is a slow drop off in the quality of students, meaning there will always be a sizable group that obsesses over being included in the pool of acceptable candidates. Add to that your quite valid reasoning concerning the stigma attached to acceptance or rejection and it becomes quite difficult to find any winners by putting Schwartz's theory into practice. His theory is only interesting in that it gets us to think more about the process, and perhaps, look at it in a different way. From that there may be some good to come of it indirectly.</p>
<p>"But you will have A college experience, simply one that is absent rowing."</p>
<p>If the orchestra has to shut down for lack of oboists, that's a huge cost to every kid in the orchestra as well as would-be orchestra fans. People aren't going to pay $50k per year for just "A" college experience, nor should they. They rightly expect a stellar four years.</p>
<p>Now, I don't think that Harvard needs 41 varsity sports. But do football, basketball, hockey teams contribute significantly to the life on campus? Yes. A functioning orchestra? Yes. Newspaper reporters? Yes. And I'd like to see a bigger admissions boost given to bass voices with good pitch, while we're at it. :)</p>
<h1>76 says quite plainly what I mean. An institution can fulfill its mission through a variety of admission policies, including drawing names from a hat if the pool of indistinguishable applicants is large enough. I do not believe saying so constitutes lying or is disingenuous in any way. Mission statements are rather broad in articulating the unchanging objectives of an institution over time. I presented Harvard's statement as an example.</h1>
<p>Aaaahhhhhh. Schwartz's point is that, from 4 years of applicants there will always be, with reasonable statistical likelihood, an oboeist, and thus there will always be an orchestra. In the unlikely case that there is not, they will invite one from elsewhere, even from Tufts, if necessary. Similarly, there will always be sports teams, altho they may very in quality (and not always downward - maybe a HB-turned-QB will step up to the task. Consider Steve Aponavicius, the walk-on kicker for BC who took the place of the suspended starter).</p>
<p>More relevant to this argument is JHS' point that it just won't work.</p>
<p>The strategy will work for Harvard or BC with 60+ colleges in the vicinity. It won't work for Colby or Bates, or Bowdoin, etc... or the dozens of highly selective colleges that are, by and large, isolated.</p>
<p>Schwarcz has got too much faith in randomness. Again, it works on a large scale. For a small school of 1200 or so? Not so much. And yes, JHS point is absolutely correct.</p>
<p>Hanna is, too. If I'm paying $45k (no if, actually; I AM paying $45k) per year, I want some certainty about not only the academics but also the ECs and other factors that made S want to attend this college and not some random other.</p>
<p>If students get to choose which colleges to apply to, why shouldn't colleges choose which students to admit? </p>
<p>OT: There is a film crew filming 21 in Boston right now (or it was a few days ago). the film is based on Bringing Down the House, the story of MIT students who used their knowledge of mathematical probability to clean out Las Vegas casinos. They did not bet randomly; and for my part, I'm willing to bet they were not admitted randomly to MIT.</p>
Sorry to belabor the point, but belabor the point I will. No they did not bet randomly. They followed the cards that were dealt until the ones remaining would, with a reasonable probability, yield a winning hand. They did not try to guess exactly what the next card dealt would be. Some hands they won, some they lost, overall they came out ahead. Sound familiar?</p>
<p>Relevant to the discussion, game theory worked against them as well. When the casinos realized they had figured out the game, they kicked them out.</p>
<p>And that's exactly what adcoms do now. They fill their needs and then they bet that on some applicants and sometimes they win and sometimes they lose. And profs like Schwarcz start wondering why the students in their classes aren't any smarter, more creative, original, committed, etc... But adcoms are human beings, ergo fallible.<br>
If the MIT kids had not followed the cards closely, the probability of their getting a winning hand would have gone way down.
Louis Menand once had an article about admissions which I do not seem to retrieve. It had to do with EA/ED. The gist was that colleges fill a lot of their niches with EA students then use the RD pool to fill the remaining gaps and to admit the BWRKs to round out their entering classes. Those niches can be athletes, donors' kids, legacies, facbrats, bassoonists, etc... I'm not including low income students in the list because it's claimed that they are less likely to apply early. It sounds to me that the kids who get selected more or less randomly, the ones about which it is often claimed that they could be replaced by an entirely new set of admits and there would be no loss of quality are the BRWKs, the bright, unhooked, untipped kids.</p>
<p>Paradoxically, the MIT 21 team relied upon both randomness and certainty to create their advantage. It is certain that the odds favor the house in the long run. However, random distribution of multiple decks of cards sometimes result the odds swinging against the house and in favor of the players for short periods of time. When the team was certain this was the case, through counting cards, they bet heavily. The trick was to make the heavy betting look random so as to avoid suspicion.</p>
<p>Edit: This scheme, once concocted, depended more upon the acting abilities of the players than mathematical ability.</p>
<p>Believe me, colleges know what they want, and they know what kind of students are the most valuable. It's not about being "good enough" in my opinion. It's about being a good person. It's foolish to assume that admissions officers nowadays aren't intelligent enough to find nuances that separate those genuinely valuable students.</p>
<p>We just overthink things...we want everything to be "fair" and 100% equal. Instead of complaining that things aren't fair, realize that MAYBE admissions officers are ALSO have something to lose in a "crapshoot" admission system, because THEY will lose the students with the highest potential. I'm absolutely sure the values that top colleges look for in a person and the values that will enable a person to be a successful, healthy, and unique member of society are one and the same.</p>
<p>"OT: There is a film crew filming 21 in Boston right now (or it was a few days ago). the film is based on Bringing Down the House, the story of MIT students who used their knowledge of mathematical probability to clean out Las Vegas casinos. They did not bet randomly; and for my part, I'm willing to bet they were not admitted randomly to MIT."</p>
<p>And the people featured in the book from MIT are people of such strong character.</p>