<p>“You guys think this is high? I think this tells ppl that the middle 50% of students in UMich are pretty stupid. No?”
uhh, no.</p>
<p>TheyCallMeCC, you are titled to your own opinion. I believe that for a university well recruited like UMich, these stats are pretty low.</p>
<p>I agree some people overvalue Michigan in some aspects, but to say some of your outrageous statements and back them up with shoddy facts is silly. GPA and act don’t mean too much IMO. I know a ton of people who had amazing gpa/act/sat who are in my oppinion, not very intelligent. Some of the smartest people I know graduated with 2.0’s. </p>
<p>Also, my high school graduating class in michigan was about 480. 30+ students got into UofM(most went to state for whatever reason)</p>
<p>also, a girl I am friends with goes to michigan. she got a 27 on her act and a 3.7 gpa(few ap classes, almost no EC’s) and got in without a waitlist or anything. Maybe she wrote good essays, I don;t know. I do know she is more of a “hard worker” type student then natural intelligence. I myself have the opposite problem and it shows in my grades. gpa is a useful tool because it is all we have, but it is not what makes a person smart…</p>
<p>True, everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, but you just called 50% of the student population “stupid”. Actually, that was only the middle 50%, so I’m gonna assume you think the bottom 25% is even dumber. So you called out 3/4ths of the student body as being stupid without even being on campus to take classes yet. Now that, my friend, is pretty damn stupid.</p>
<p>I was in the same boat as you: good scores got me into a lot of great schools. But in no way did I think I was above someone just because I got a higher SAT score or something. I hope you don’t judge the people you currently know this way. You need to get off the pedestal and realize that coming in, you’re no better than any of the other freshman.</p>
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^^Yep he did call out 75% of UMich’s students. </p>
<p>I wouldn’t be surprised if he falls into that 75% category.</p>
<p>Oh boy! You’re in for a rude awakening! </p>
<p>You could have had a 2300 SAT score and a 4.0 high school GPA, but still have to work hard for a respectable GPA in Michigan. In fact, a friend of mine got into HYP but chose to go to Michigan as it was in-state and got into the Honors college. Today, my friend barely has a 3.5. Go figure.</p>
<p>High school achievements mean nothing once you get to college.</p>
<p>"High school achievements mean nothing once you get to college. "
Might sound like a broken record but elite funds/prop firms like DE Shaw, Citadel, Jane street Capital, SIG ask you for your SAT scores, even if you are 50 years old. So they dont exactly mean nothing.</p>
<p>I asked one of the interviewers why they ask for it.
He said they believe that 1) SAT is strongly correlated with IQ, not always the case but a good screening tool 2) SAT similar to the high pressure/little time decision making environment in trading/market making.</p>
<p>^^^^Of course very few of those high scoring SAT/ACT students ever take any preparation courses to achieve their numbers. That top schools would allow super scoring and students to take tests again and again tells me that high pressure/little time decision making environments should only apply to the time you are 17 years old. I’d also say your interviewer, and those types of companies, are just looking for excuses to weed out people as easily as possible. Seriously, it’s ridiculous.</p>
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<p>Interesting. That’s a strange way of testing how qualified a candidate is. </p>
<p>I personally would stick my two fingers up at them if they judged me (or any other candidate) on his/her SAT score. Just my two cents.</p>
<p>“I personally would stick my two fingers up at them if they judged me (or any other candidate) on his/her SAT score”</p>
<p>Plenty of candidates wouldnt do that :-p</p>
<p>“Employment opportunities at D. E. Shaw are known to be extremely competitive, with only one applicant in several hundred being offered a position.”</p>
<p>and it is a good screening tool. You could argue that the really really high SATs scores (2300+) can be acheived by taking prep courses. But there’s no reason for a really really smart person ( and I mean really really smart… rumor is DE Shaw takes 1 out of 500 candidates for full time… and JSC test people on number theory and olympiad level math for their 6th round interview) not to break 2100 on the first try. So let’s say if an applicant list a 1900 on his resume, they can safely remove him from the applicant pool.</p>
<p>For firms that are known to hire the smartest people in the world and engage in work like stats arbitrage where raw intelligence is more important than any other things including personal skills (like DE Shaw and JSC), they can safely assume that those candidate under that threshold has nothing to offer. I think it’s used more as an elimination tool, rather than a tool that makes people qualified for the jobs.</p>
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<p>eh. I’m not gonna let my self-worth be defined by whether or not I get hired by a top recruiter. I’ll just open up my own company or get a job with which I can life comfortably. :-p</p>
<p>Although, I wonder what an interview between D.E. Shaw and Coolbrezze would be like (assuming he gets one by a miracle) :-P</p>
<p>this was one of the questions I was asked during an interview, and less than 1% of the people answer it right within 5 minutes given during the interview</p>
<p>So you have 2 identical eggs, and a 100 story building. Both eggs have the same breaking threshold. What is the minimum number of times do you have to drop the eggs to certainly determine the minimum floor you need to be on to break the eggs? </p>
<p>and I am telling you this question is really hard. Normally I wouldnt be able to figure it out. Something struck me that day and I miraculously figured it out. Their record is 10 seconds. Oh and remember, they try to distract you and stare at you and make noise to see how you handle yourself under pressure while you try to figure that out.</p>
<p>By the way, the worst part is, this brainteaser is classified as medium level.</p>
<p>Now, make it 3 eggs and 1000 floors. This is the hard type. Never figured it out, even to this day lol but I dont want to look up the solution. I have an idea how to do it, but can never figure out the level numbers. So if anyone has any idea, please shoot. </p>
<p>“Although, I wonder what an interview between D.E. Shaw and Coolbrezze would be like”</p>
<p>LOL</p>
<p>^^^^Now that’s a tough interview!</p>
<p>cdz, my stats and ECs are way above the bottom 75%.</p>
<p>I see GPA and SAT as indicators of how well students will perform in college. That’s what admission officers do. For those argues that HS GPA and SAT doesn’t mean crapload, admission offices of many universities have monitoring systems that track how their current undergrads are performing. If GPA and SAT doesn’t indicate how well a HS student will perform in college, then the admission officers will have picked up the lack of correlation and abandoned the two criterias, instead of using them for decades.</p>
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<p>All I can say is, wait until you get your first exam scores back buddy.</p>
<p>Having high school stats that are above 75% of students at Michigan does not mean you’ll do better than 75% of students at Michigan. You know what? Michigan didn’t consider me qualified enough to get in, so waitlisted me when I applied as a senior in high school. So according to you, I must have been in that “not so smart kids at Michigan” category. Guess what? I transferred in, got into Ross, and have been performing above average in most of my business school classes. A lot of my friends share a similar story, including internationals with 1840 and 1950 SAT scores, getting A’s in tough engineering courses, while others are acing classes like Econ 401 and doing extremely well in the b-school.</p>
<p>Actually, while the topic IS controversial, there have been a number of studies that do suggest a correlation between SAT performance and IQ. So it would not surprise me if it is used as a general screening device for some types of positions (specifically quantitative, as mentioned above.) Now - that’s standard IQ, not emotional intelligence, sociability, or creativity index, which some, like Gardner, suggest can be as valuable or more valuable in a vocational setting (depending on the vocation.)
While we’re on the topic, IF you buy that SAT performance is roughly = to IQ, I will note that the average SAT score of an incoming freshman at U Mich (if converted to IQ formula) still represents the top 96 - 99th percentile in terms of “IQ”. Meaning that Number One considers the top 4% of the population “pretty dumb”, which (sorry) is terribly naive.</p>
<p>This thread is pointless. Until the incoming freshman get through their first semester, they have no idea what they are talking about. Then they will figure out their 4.0’s and 36 ACTs from high school don’t mean anything.</p>
<p>High school GPA and SAT shows how good a student can potentially perform. It doesn’t show how good a student can actually be. However, admission have done a relatively good job picking out which can perform well in high school. There are many other factors that can cause students to do bad in college–poor time management, faster pace learning, difficult curves etc.
And yes SAT does have a good coloration to the IQ test.</p>
<p>The point of this thread was to talk about the selectivity of UMich. Do you guys SERIOUSLY consider 49% as selective? Especially with rolling admission? </p>
<p>I keep on reading posters by ppl who chance others, saying how UMich is a reach for the OP. As long as they apply early and have decent stats and essays, UMich is not a reach for anyone.</p>
<p>Number1. You have a whopping 37 posts on CC. You know everything already. You must be a genius.</p>