<p>ddy: The higher female GPA (or atleast higher female graduation rate) is true.</p>
<p>pundit, </p>
<p>I think that the blanket graduation rate doesn't mean a whole lot without taking into account majors - i.e. if males are self-selecting themselves into 'harder' majors than females on average, you'd see the same thing.</p>
<p>
[quote]
ddy: The higher female GPA (or atleast higher female graduation rate) is true.
[/quote]
Graduation rate alone says nothing. And as for GPA, I think a breakdown by major would be more valid. Physics, math, engineering, computer science tend to be more rigorous than biology, for example. And it is my understanding that a disproportionate number of guys will enter these more 'difficult' majors. Note: When I say 'difficult' I mean difficult conceptually, not necessarily just in the amount of work required for graduation.</p>
<p>Also, if you have, please do not take my comments as a personal attack. I freely admit that there are plenty of women who are much smarter than most guys (and me) and deserve to be at MIT. If you fall within that group, you have no reason to be defensive.</p>
<p>A breakdown by major wouldn't reveal much either, because the electives are so diverse. Females could take more easy electives such as biology and English. Males would easily better the females in those courses anyway. - That's why males don't tend to take biology. It's not challenging enough. - Why don't you compare them within the same course, I mean any hard course then?</p>
<p>Or wait, you could start from anatomical differences to be more accurate.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I can't judge the intelligence of MIT women I don't know, but I do know the girls at Caltech (including those who turned down MIT for Caltech) are smart cookies
[/quote]
</p>
<p>cookies? :-P</p>
<p>well, now I'm a little confused. I thought your reason for wanting to know the GPA or SAT scores of incoming women/men is to determine whether women were admitted at a lower standard than men. Now your desire to see the distribution of women vs. men and their respective GPAs in your "difficult" fields seems to me a comparison of whether the smartest girls are on average smarter than the smartest boys. Which doesn't mean much in terms of admissions but is a pretty larry summers-esque line of thought.</p>
<p>Our friends' daughter is a senior in CE (I know, not a rigorous enough major) and has been straight A (or, does MIT give A-'s? If yes, she must be straight A-) in CE-required courses. Having been unchallenged, she had to lower herself to take premed courses. Rumor says she's straight A there as well, no, rather, straight A-.</p>
<p>Isolated case, doesn't mean anything.</p>
<p>Too bad I don't know of a math genius girl. - If only the world was filled with more boys, then we'd see more math geniuses.</p>
<p>Don't be silly, pebbles. What he's asking for is just a measure of the success of MIT's application process. If women do equally well as men in tough subjects, then clearly MIT admissions is justified in how they admit males vs. females.</p>
<p>Looking at the results a better indicator than looking at prior qualifications: i.e. who cares if MIT male admits had higher SATs/GPA/AIME etc. (hypothetically) than MIT female admits if the female admits do equally well once they get into MIT's curriculum.</p>
<p>
Well, I don't know about that. That's certainly not why I, a male physics major, chose not to major in biology.</p>
<p>Right, but saying that women's matriculation into biology as opposed to physics is somehow a factor that needs to be weighted against their actual GPAs is kind of eyebrow-raising. GPA is GPA no matter what your personal educational goals/ interests are. I don't think bio classes are curved too differently from physics classes. (B/C centered, that is)</p>
<p>RE: ^^ I think he was being sarcastic sir :P</p>
<p>I've been following these threads rather closely for the last few weeks.</p>
<p>One point I have for some of the upset seeming posters (Master<em>Of</em>Balances comes to mind): fit/match/merit, if you were in the top 5% of applicants, I think you would have gotten in either way. </p>
<p>Seeing as so many on this board are rather competitive, why did you assume you just had to do well in high school classes? Even if you did well, didn't you ever wonder whether doing the absolute best at your high school was good enough when compared to other applicants?</p>
<p>To Quote Master<em>0f</em>Balances:</p>
<p>"I have so, so many problems with this mindset.</p>
<p>First, while pointless busywork certainly exists in abundance in most high school environment, it is not accurate to classify all assignments in high school as busywork. You seem to be expressing the view (which I've seen more than once in this thread and others) that any time a supposedly intelligent student gets a bad grade it's because they were too busy with research/other lofty, high-minded pursuits to be bothered with doing their homework. Even if this is true, I don't believe that high school students, genius-level or not, always have enough experience and maturity to be able to correctly judge when work is pointless. Many times in basic chem I felt that the textbook assignments were pointless and repetitive, but looking back I can tell that doing them helped me become a lot more competent at the subject."</p>
<p>First, many of these students who are trying a "perfectly reasonable deviation from the deviation path" are taking a big risk to begin with. The truth is that the vast majority of high school work is trivial. Sure, there are some classes, such as AP [Bio, Chem, Physics C] where you really do have to sit down and hit the books. But the vast majority of classes aren't actually educating you. You're learning a few facts, and some basic algorithms, but in retrospect the majority of it was just filler time. There was no underlying deeper purpose. For a lot of smart kids, motivation is key, and if they don't see the purpose, there isn't much pushing them forward. Plus, a lot of smart kids quickly realize that there is relatively little distinction between in an A and a B in many classes (whether you get an A or a B, in the long term you still know practically nothing compared to what is to come).</p>
<p>Yes doing exercises in the back of the book is important. But doing exercises takes time, and for those pursuing other activities, they accept the tradeoff of not doing all the problems at the back of the chapter.</p>
<p>Second, I think you are mischaracterizing research. I think when a lot of people cite research, they don't mean doing some small internship or summer program. When I talk about research, I'm talking about spending 2-3 hours, and sometimes all night, working on a project that could eventually be published in a journal, work that they have truly committed their life (at least for the time being) to. You can usually tell these kids apart from the pack.</p>
<p>This is not trivial at all, and teaches students things that can't be taught in the classroom. </p>
<p>(1) The stuff you learn from a textbook is nicely formatted and has often been worked out for decades if not centuries. Research requires working at the very cutting edge of what's known, and this is not easy because often times other scientists will disagree. Have you ever read a solid research paper from Nature? It takes years before you can read the thing the first time through and really understand what was done (and even then you have to go back a few times). That means every research paper you read will teach you betwen 5-10 new things (especially for mathematical analysis) not even related to the actual result of the paper. </p>
<p>(2) Research instills a sense of doubt. Good research students eventually realize that they really should not trust other scientists at their word, and that they need to very carefully and critically analyze other scientists work before accepting it. You will often find that papers published in prestigious journals make assumptions or only present selected data. </p>
<p>(3) Research teaches perseverance in working on a hard problem for a long time. Most classes teach a new concept every few days, give some homework, and move on. Imagine working on the same problem for many months, if not years in many cases. Especially when things don't seem to be working out, it gets very very hard to keep going. </p>
<p>Yes I will admit that many students do research just for college, but some of us literally talk, eat and dream this stuff. What's more, when someone is describing what they are doing to you in 30 seconds, of course they aren't going to go into the deeper theory. Many competition presentations are just to catch public interest, not to critically analyze the work.</p>
<p>"Also, you then proceed to give more excuses for admits with bad grades that go completely against the prior argument. If a class is graded mostly on one or two tests (like, hmm, many university courses are), then busywork can't possibly be a factor in a student doing poorly. High schools are not filled with unreasonable teachers who fail sick students, and when people say they studied the wrong thing it usually means they didn't study at all."</p>
<p>If you judge someone's intelligence off of one or two tests, are you really getting a good measurement? College class tests are there to help guide students in cummulatively reviewing all the material. It's easy to make a few mistakes that leads to an explosion.</p>
<p>"The issue with this mentality of excusing student performance for some ethereal reasons about their quirkiness or personality is that it wrongs every student who grit his teeth and worked hard to get good grades and good scores. If MIT is looking for hard-working students who can survive in a tough science/math-oriented atmosphere, I don't know why they (or you) are making so many excuses for people who frankly seem unreliable and flaky. Maybe some excuses actually have reasons behind them, but I can't accept that it's a good policy to ignore hard-working, obviously intelligent students in favor of gut feelings."</p>
<p>IMO MIT wants hard working students who aren't just going to survive MIT, but excel there. I believe they also want students who don't just understand the material, they understand how all the material fits together. Maybe I'm being idealistic, but then I'm talking about a small minority of the applicants. Take a look at MIT's graduate school admissions. If you are applying from MIT, they don't seem to hold grades/GRE's as highly as recommendations and research (UROPS). </p>
<p>I don't think you should be too quick to bash these different-path students.</p>
<p>I'm an MIT '11 (male, asian, though it shouldn't impact what I'm saying), and again, just my interpretation, so take it or leave it. I haven't actually had classes at MIT, so I can't speak for MIT students.</p>
<p>
What about bio compared to engineering? I'm pretty confident there are average GPA differences between those (if Caltech is any guide).</p>
<p>
[quote]
Graduation rate alone says nothing.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Actually, I would say that it says quite a bit. After all, if men really are graduating at a lower rate than are women, that does profoundly speak to a level of immaturity in the men. Either they're not serious about doing the work. Or they foolishly choose majors that are too difficult for them and are not wise enough to switch out to something easier. Either way, it's a mark of immaturity. </p>
<p>Look, nobody goes to college just for the sake of going to college. You go to college in order to get a degree. If you don't do that, then you're not accomplishing what you set out to do.</p>
<p>So lower graduation rate = more immature? Are you serious? Not only does that not take into account even close to all of the reasons students drop out, but it doesn't account for transfer students either (who after all don't graduate at MIT but may graduate somewhere else).</p>
<p>
[quote]
...that does profoundly speak to a level of immaturity in the men...
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Why do I sense people that would not say this if the roles were reversed?</p>
<p>
I've been following these threads rather closely for the last few weeks.</p>
<p>One point I have for some of the upset seeming posters (Master<em>Of</em>Balances comes to mind): fit/match/merit, if you were in the top 5% of applicants, I think you would have gotten in either way.</p>
<p>Seeing as so many on this board are rather competitive, why did you assume you just had to do well in high school classes? Even if you did well, didn't you ever wonder whether doing the absolute best at your high school was good enough when compared to other applicants?
</p>
<p>MIT claims to have contextual admissions. In practice, though, this seems to end up meaning that if a student's high school record does not appear to be extremely high-achieving, they will use anything else on the application to justify it, but if a student's high school record is high-achieving, they somehow cannot accept that maybe that student actually became involved in their current academic pursuits.</p>
<p>In my state (Maine), the only major research opportunities that exist are in genetics and biotechnology. Unfortunately, I am not a "soft science" person (I greatly admire those who are, but it is simply not how my mind works). So instead of half-heartedly becoming involved in research that I knew I could not dedicate myself to, I participated more in my math, physics, and chemistry classes (as well as history and English, because, as may be evident, I am not one to back down from a debate), because that was the outlet I had available to me*. This shows up in my grades, my scores, and my recommendations, and yet somehow, this hard evidence seems to be worth less to MIT than the soft evidence of students writing anecdotal essays about how, in spite of bad grades X, Y, and Z, they actually spent a lot of time reading about subject N on their own, etc.</p>
<p>If MIT truly looks at applications in context, they should not have to have the meanings and excuses behind every detail of the application written about for them in flowery prose. I'm not surprised that I didn't get into some of the liberal arts schools to which I applied, because I am not a liberal arts person. However, I would expect MIT to have admissions policies befitting a technical, scientific institute, but the evidence that they do seems shaky.</p>
<p>*I do not want a reply telling me how, if that were the case, I should have self-studied this, and done this project and that competition. The classes I took were challenging, and MIT knows that classes at my high school are challenging, because it has admitted more than a few students from my school over the years.</p>
<p>The idea currently being presented that putting less emphasis on academic merit and rigor takes the pressure off of students is simply not the case. This idea demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding: for many of the students who fit in at MIT, academics, especially math and science, often are fun and relaxing, while vagueness and platitudes certainly are not. By muddling the waters and trying to achieve a larger applicant pool by basically misleading students as to what MIT wants and is like, their admissions office is then forced to read every application as though the student had no idea about the real MIT beyond the admissions propaganda, underestimating some students and overestimating others.</p>
<p>"Why do I sense people that would not say this if the roles were reversed?"</p>
<p>because if the roles were reversed that would read "because of the intellectual inferiority of all the men". Maybe that'll make you feel better.</p>
<p>"In practice, though, this seems to end up meaning that if a student's high school record does not appear to be extremely high-achieving, they will use anything else on the application to justify it, but if a student's high school record is high-achieving, they somehow cannot accept that maybe that student actually became involved in their current academic pursuits."</p>
<p>what?? if this were true there wouldn't be any valedictorians or high achievers admitted to MIT. I think this is getting a little ridiculous.</p>
<p>Was the M/F graduation differential posted? I slogged through many pages and didn't see it.</p>
<p>At MIT non-graduation is partly driven by engineering students leaving to join startups or work in industry. This affects males more, not only because they are likelier to select such majors, but also to take the associated risk.</p>
<p>It is well publicized that females nationwide graduate more often than men at high school and university level. It is of course legitimate for MIT, if it desires a higher overall graduation rate, to give some advantage to female applicants for this reason. However, if the female surplus is lower at MIT than at comparable schools, and possibly if it is lower than the national differential, then that is evidence that there is a further effect leading to lower than expected graduation of females from MIT.</p>
<p>Also, it is the relative likelihood of non-graduation that should be compared, not the graduation rates which are high for both sexes. (This method is more favorable to the females, one would think).</p>
<p>I have no opinion on what the outcome would be of a graduation rate analysis, but I think it would be hard to argue that the raw admissions rates, especially when compared with the matriculation rates for Caltech, don't point to a clear admissions advantage (and thus likelier lower objective standards) for the women at MIT. What happens after admisson is harder to analyze.</p>
<p>
[quote]
because if the roles were reversed that would read "because of the intellectual inferiority of all the men". Maybe that'll make you feel better.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Pfft. If the roles were reversed, nobody would dare call female MIT students "profoundly immature" and nobody would bring up an "inconvenient" statistic like this. I hope pebbles+friends can open open their eyes and see this.</p>
<p>Oh, of course, no one would dare call female students "profoundly immature", mostly because they're so ****ing busy calling them underqualified, less intelligent, and less likely to take difficult majors and take risks. I'm glad to know there's SOME limit to the amount of sexism people on this forum are willing to exhibit.</p>
<p>Also, it amazes me to read the outright demands that MIT provide SAT statistics broken down by gender, but when other statistics are presented in a similar way, suddenly there are too many factors for the statistics to be valid. Good thing the SAT is such a flawless indicator of intelligence and success. Did it ever occur to any of you in the hours you spend complaining about it that MIT considers context, personality, etc (all the "soft" criteria, as you call it) precisely <em>because</em> of the kinds of factors you're citing? The only difference is, at least they're not sexist jerks about it, so they don't assume that those factors will have a disproportionate negative effect on women.</p>