<p>QUOTE:
"2) If a person does not do so well in science classes or does not indicated strong ability in math or science (relative to Caltech applicants) he or she can still be accepted."</p>
<p>Really???? That surprises me.</p>
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Really???? That surprises me.
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No need for four question marks. It's really not that surprising.</p>
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I find it absolutely terrible and inexcusable that people are now impugning the integrity of the rest of the admissions staff.
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<p>The two admissions people who posted a defense of all the good work she had done and how it will continue to be "celebrated", "upheld", and continued, are operating as flaks. They deserve some criticism for this, which has nothing to do with their integrity and everything to do with their intelligence.</p>
<p>Their defense of Miss Jones is evidence that she created a personality cult within the admissions office, which is not uncommon in these situations. Her defenders in the admissions office need to step back and ask themselves whether they want to defend the past or face the new reality.</p>
<p>" I thought the Grutter decision was about numeric quotas.
marite is offline"</p>
<p>marite - It was the undergraduate case Gratz vs Bollinger that was about numeric quotas. Grutter vs. Bollinger was the Law School case and the Supreme Court held that the Law School's narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body is not prohibited by the Equal Protection Clause. The facts were that caucasian applicants with Grutter's LSAT and GPA were admitted 8.*% of the time but Black students with the same stats were admitted 100% of the time. Grutter won in the lower courts.</p>
<p>Essentially Grutter proved there was racial discrimination but the Supreme Court ruled that it was OK in this case because it served a higher purpose. Or to put it another way the ends justified the means.</p>
<p>If 1 in 10 male applicants is accepted while 1 in 4 female applicants is accepted to produce a class that is basically 50/50 what would a reasonable person conclude? The obvious answer is the male and female applications were dropped into separate silos each of was was given 50% of available slots.</p>
<p>Male applicants compete against male applicants for male admission slots and female applicants compete against female applicants for the female quota. MIT probably has a sufficiently large number of highly qualified applicants of both sexes that all admitted students are qualified it is just that you have to be even more outstanding to get in if you are a man.</p>
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<p>Thanks for putting it so well, marite.</p>
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I still find it incredible that her credentials weren't scrutiinized despite her being an in-house promotion. She still had 59 rivals for the job. Most probably did have degrees from very prestigious places.
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<p>Most admissions people at most schools, including MIT, do not have stellar degrees. There will generally be several people who are alumni and the director will often be an alumnus. The turnover rate among alumni working at the admissions office is huge (i.e. recent students who take a couple of years before grad school). The general turnover rate is also high, at MIT it was just reported at 40 percent. </p>
<p>Jones probably had several in-house competitors with similar seniority and several outside competitors, of which a few had degrees from top schools.
Very few people in the admissions business have PhD's of any prestige.</p>
<p>"Those who claim that the process was tainted should specific exactly how it was tainted"</p>
<p>I think I just did that. Discrimination is the decision to hold members of a given group to different standards in admission, hiring graduation etc. The only way you could have such disparate admissions outcomes between men and women is if you were deliberately discriminating on the basis of sex. If MIT wants to go to the courts and argue as U of Michigan Law Schools did that they ought to be able to favour women in admissions for an educational purpose then bully for them. I'm not sure they would get the same exemption for sex as Michigan did for race but who knows.</p>
<p>
Bitterness waves going high in this thread. I think it was incredibly cocky of Ms. Jones, but also a proof of how bureaucraticized for the worse our society has become if a college drop-out actually doing a sufficiently good job has her entire body of work deemed invalid over that fact.
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<p>Do you have any idea what you're talking about?</p>
<p>Jones and her work are being criticized because she committed blatant, repeated fraud and in doing so, demonstrated a lack of respect for academia as a whole. She derived respect from her claims to have a PhD; she did not deserve this respect, because she did not put in the work necessary to actually achieve one. That she acts and speaks as though this was a "misinterpretation" further shows that either she simply does not understand the severity of her offenses, or she does not care, and it is probably the latter.</p>
<p>She made statements specifically to the point that because she was trained as a scientist, she was able to competently work as dean of admissions for a scientific institute. She was not, in fact, trained as a scientist, and this fact should and does cast a shadow over the work that she did in that position.</p>
<p>"No need for four question marks."</p>
<p>No need for snottiness. </p>
<p>Some people have become very unpleasant on this thread. (Btw, you're one of the "firestorm of posts" you accuse others of.)</p>
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Most admissions people at most schools, including MIT, do not have stellar degrees...Very few people in the admissions business have PhD's of any prestige.
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<p>But I'm willing to bet most have them have been to college.</p>
<p>I've been wondering, does MIT plan to require that candidates to replace M. Jones have at least a little post-high school formal education? So many posters on CC are of the opinion that she did a wonderful job with just a high school diploma, so perhaps MIT shouldn't waste a lot of money paying the college-grad rate.</p>
<p>Besides, siserune (607), the position under discussion is Dean of admissions. I know more than a few deans (albeit not in admissions). They all have doctorates in their field. It may not be necessary for a Dean of admissions to hold a doctorate or be published in the field, but it seems to me that it would be mighty helpful to know what it is like to be a college student if one's job is to determine who has what it takes to be a college student.</p>
<p>Also, your post brings up the fact that there were many other applicants for the dean's job. Does anyone know if any of the other applicants were actually interviewed on campus, if they had the opportunity to give presentations?</p>
<p>dear midmo,</p>
<p>my views on the lack of degree can be found at</p>
<p>Functioning in the job and actual competence are two different things. </p>
<p>It would be very much to MIT's advantage to have its admissions determined by people who graduated from MIT or similar school (Caltech, IIT, etc), who had to surmount the admissions hurdles demanded of the incoming undergrad (and preferably, hard-science PhD) students, who have personal experience of research and an affinity for the scientist/engineer culture. </p>
<p>Given this scandal, it is high time the faculty assume direct oversight, or perhaps install one of their own as head of admissions. Oversight could mean many things, but one hopes for something similar to grad school admissions where the professors have most of the say in what kind of population they want to teach. e.g., the admissions office gives them the top 150 percent of candidates relative to the number of slots to be offered, the faculty narrow it down to 110 percent of those, and admissions decides the rest.</p>
<p>I was amused by the closing comment in the NYT article, especially in light of her self comparison to Mick Jagger:</p>
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Those who attended this month’s events for admitted students said Ms. Jones had been in good spirits, especially at a Saturday night finale. There, Ms. Jones, who in younger days was a torch singer at upstate New York clubs, took part in a “battle of the bands,” singing, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”
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Well, it seems she got what she wanted WITHOUT having what was needed. </p>
<p>Wouldn’t you have loved to hear her sing this line:
“She was practiced at the art of deception . . .” !:)</p>
<p>I keep thinking of Frank Abagnale Jr., the real-life character from the movie “Catch me if you can” “who successfully impersonated an airline pilot, doctor, assistant attorney general and history professor, cashing more than $2.5 million in fraudulent checks in 26 countries.” (From the IMDB) Evidently after he was apprehended the FBI/Treasury Department drew on his forgery skills to help solve bank fraud cases.</p>
<p>Personally, I think MIT let Marilee off way too easy. Surely a crime was committed here. She should be prosecuted.</p>
<p>^^^
Perhaps she should be given the death penalty??</p>
<p>On the President Jacksons Page at RPI there is a button on the left side of the page to take you to the "2008 Honorary Degree Nomination Form".</p>
<p><a href="http://www.rpi.edu/president/index.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.rpi.edu/president/index.html</a></p>
<p>Should be simple to fill out. Lets Try:</p>
<p>Candidates Name: Marilee Jones DOB: 195?</p>
<p>Present Position: Homemaker and Parent </p>
<p>Reason for Awarding Degree: Candidate has a long association with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; having claimed an Undergraduate Degree from RPI since 1979, and she did attend as a part time non-matriculated student during the 1974-75 school year. She has risen to prominence in her field and proven that formal training is unnecessary to excel. A noted speaker on College Admissions she has advanced the idea that Colleges need to reduce the level of stress for students in the College Admissions process. A theme that has been widely applauded. She recently published a book "Less Stress, More Success: A New Approach to Guiding Your Teen Through College Admissions and Beyond, written with a pediatrician, Dr. Kenneth R. Ginsburg. The book had added to her reputation as a kind of guru of the movement to tame the college admissions frenzy.</p>
<p>Less Stress, More Success addresses not only the pressure to be perfect but also a need to live with integrity.</p>
<p>Holding integrity is sometimes very hard to do because the temptation may be to cheat or cut corners, it says. But just remember that what goes around comes around, meaning that life has a funny way of giving back what you put out. </p>
<p>This would be an excellent Topic for Marilee Jones to present in a Commencement Address considering the unique perspective she can bring to the discussion.</p>
<p>We strongly support Marilee Jones as a Candidate for an Honorary Degree and as a Commencement Speaker RPI</p>
<p>Degrees earned and Institution: None that we know of
Previous Honors and Organizations Awarding: Too Numerous to Mention - and listing them all would cause me stress!!!
Suggested as both: Commencement Speaker and Honorary Degree Recipient</p>
<p>Proposed by: (Just fill in your Title, Name, address and Phone #)</p>
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<p>After you have filled out the online form you can just email it to the Presidents Office at RPI. a Link is even provided on the form.</p>
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<p>Once Marilee has her Honorary Doctorate, maybe she can get her old job back, if a degree was all that she was lacking. :)</p>
<p>Ha! Ha! Ha! Good one, richs73cas!</p>
<p>higherlead, your conclusions about the statistics of male v. female admissions are skewed, as are many that are based on raw numbers without detail behind them. It is just as likely that the qualifications of the top 50% of female applicants to MIT equal or exceed the top 10% of male applicants to MIT, as it is for the admissions results to be due to discrimination.</p>
<p>How? The female applicants may be much more convinced than males that they truly want to pursue a technical career to the exclusion of all else. It is much more difficult for female students in high school to "buck the trend" of one's social life and concentrate on the strictly math & science type of extracurriculars that would make one a good candidate for MIT, so fewer do but more succeed. (And I'm not talking about females having fewer opportunities or resources; just that fewer take advantage of them.) Females may be less likely to "dabble" in technological areas. Female "dabblers" wouldn't even consider applying to MIT, while male "dabblers" might. Females may want the more diverse environment of a science or engineering major at a more diverse research university or even an LAC than a stricter institute of technology.</p>
<p>For any of these reasons, and many more that I haven't thought of, the female applicant pool may be so self-selected and so well or even over-qualified as compared to the male pool that it would be discriminatory not to admit 50% of them. </p>
<p>And perhaps, despite all her lying and cheating, which I cannot in any way condone, Marilee Jones was appointed by the Board of Trustees to, and did, do away with this discrimination.</p>
<p>Marite: re "unless criteria are set so low as to make failure nearly impossible, there is no reason to challenge graduation rates as a good metric": The graduation rate at Harvard is about 97%, and getting a C is very easy, I think this provides more than enough reason to challenge the use of graduation rates as a metric of the capabiltiy of the admittees. It is probably somewhat harder to meet the minimum requirements at MIT, but I think many students manage to do much better than a C average, isn't the average around a 3.3 (on the usual 4 point scale)? So simply looking at graduation rates is throwing away a lot of information.</p>
<p>I still really don't see why, if students meet minimum requirements for graduation, this calls into question their admissibility. They have not flunked courses, have they? Is a C such a bad grade? It used to be average. It depends on expectations, how hard a particular course is.</p>
<p>I recall the shock with which a Harvard Ph.D. student told me about a course he'd been hired to teach at a college that shall remain nameless. He was told not to assign more than 25 pages of reading for a humanities course--granted, this was not a LAC, but he'd been used, as a Harvard TF, to lead sections for classes in a department where the guidelines for reading assignments was 250+ pages per week.
If your kid is considering Harvard for science and math, here is a bit of info. In one class, the mean was 60+/160 and the SD was 31. The class was an upper-level one in which everyone was a concentrator. I have no idea what this will mean in terms of letter grades. It sounds, however, that the instructor designed a deliberately hard exam (same principle as using the SAT in Talent Searches).</p>