MENSA and CTY College Application Question

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<p>Not an expert - my educational background’s in pyschostats, and I’ve got some personal interest in the topic. :)</p>

<p>I didn’t realize until I was looking at that article and the current cuts that the recentering affected the verbal cutoff for SET, but not the math. Math has always been 700+; Verbal used to be 630+ and is now 700+. Looking at the recentering tables ([SAT</a> I Individual Score Equivalents | Research and Development](<a href=“http://research.collegeboard.org/programs/sat/data/equivalence/sat-individual]SAT”>http://research.collegeboard.org/programs/sat/data/equivalence/sat-individual)), both are slightly higher (harder to get) under the new test than under the old.</p>

<p>In any case, I agree with you completely - mere membership (in any group) isn’t going to help.</p>

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<p>No, I am sure the typical admissions officer knows what SET is, or at least knows how to use Google. </p>

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<p>A huge percentage of SET members end up at top schools because SET students are extraordinarily intelligent, as you say. But it’s not the fact that they did SET that leads to admission. It’s the fact that extraordinarily intelligent people can often be extraordinarily successful high school students. My guess is that they could remove all mention of SET from their applications and have the same admit rate.</p>

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<p>My daughter is a senior in college, so my info is old. However, she was a kid who never did anything based on how it would look on an application. The very first CTY class she took was after third grade. It was a class that looked at ancient cultures. When application time came around, her early interest in cultures was evident through a couple of other activities she was very involved in and it made sense for her to weave it all together. It wasn’t about the scores or how smart she was; it was the demonstration of the thrill of learning.</p>