<ol>
<li><p>One of them won a Hoopes Prize, and is working for Bain (boooo!). He concentrated in History of Science, with a secondary in Visual Arts (Painting). The other was a Math concentrator, I believe, but is not a big Facebook user, and my son hasn’t talked to him in a while.</p></li>
<li><p>Yes, they both benefited from teachers who could recognize good thinking. I note, however, that they each needed only two teacher recommendations. They didn’t need a whole school full of teachers who thought they were wonderful.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I don’t think that the Ivies “pass over” more qualified apps to pick less qualified. I think that they have a different view of the word “qualified” – they aren’t just looking for one type of student. Choosing a college class is like casting a play – they need to select students to fill a lot of different roles. So sometimes a particular talent or interest is going to be what stands out about a particular student-- so they take one kid with somewhat lower stats and pass over the higher stat kid from the same high school because of whatever that other quality is. The higher stat kit might be academically stronger, but maybe his EC’s & essay topics look just like hundreds of other applicants, while the lower stat kid stands out. Sometimes its obvious – i.e., lower stat kid is a star athlete – but sometimes it isn’t. It could even be the type of under-the-radar EC or talent that others at the school may not be aware of. </p>
<p>Obviously it can be a somewhat arbitrary choice, because the only thing the ad coms really have to go on are application, whatever record there may be to document the EC’s, the LORs, and the essays. I used to read essays for CC kids on request (no more!) – and sometimes there would be kid with great stats but their essays were blah – boring, prosaic, merely repeating a common theme. Sometimes I would get essays that blew my socks off, and sometimes the essays were really “about” nothing – it was the quality of the writing and the details that astounded me. I still have a vivid memory of the essays of one girl who was accepted ED to Yale. Every time I saw that sort of essay – the kid got accepted, and it was no surprise to me. I imagine that the admission readers at top schools see many of those essays, but that they are still quite rare in the overall applicant pool. That’s why you really don’t get the flavor of things when an ad com refers to an essay about shopping – it isn’t what the essay was about, it’s the way it was written, what the student observed and chose to relate. </p>
<p>The same is going to be true of the LOR’s - they tell a story. If they are telling the same story that the ad com is seeing told over and over again, then that very strong applicant may simply not stand out enough.</p>
<p>what I imagine when Quantmech describes a small subset is a group of students who have the potential, and likely interest, to make a very significant positive change in the world for large segments of the population… if not for all of society… through their intellectual endeavors. </p>
<p>is that what the rest of you are thinking?</p>
<p>or just me?</p>
<p>
I once read an essay by a kid applying to Caltech the year my son applied. (And I’d told him there was a bit of a conflict of interest there!) Anyway it was a nice essay, I made a comment, he made a change based on it (that I never would have though of doing), and blew that thing out of the park. I was not surprised when he got accepted. Most of the essays were fine, but didn’t grab me particularly.</p>
<p>
That’s what I’d imagine. In the past Harvard has said they accept about 200 of these sorts of kids off the bat. It doesn’t surprise me that a zillion people don’t go off to get PhDs from the HYP - their goal is to accept leaders across the board - intellectual leaders yes, but also political, business and artistic ones.</p>
<p>I don’t think that Harvard has retreated from the view expressed in the admissions office report linked by bovertine in December 2011. They will surely have repudiated the extremely classist view expressed in the report, but the philosophy in terms of crafting a class very likely still stands. So, if you take the “happy bottom quarter,” for instance, I think there is no question that Harvard is passing over somewhat better students, who would not be happy in the bottom quarter, for those who would be. The discussion in the report also addresses “bridge students,” who connect the “happy bottom quarter” to the identified academic superstars, but who are not themselves academic superstars. While there is no question in my mind that all of the admitted students are strong, I think that the classifications of “happy bottom quarter” and “bridge students” would not exist in any form if Harvard simply admitted the students they considered the most qualified, in the way that they define “qualified.” So I disagree with calmom to that extent. </p>
<p>As I observed above, I can’t really fault H or Y in terms of the local admissions outcomes known to me.</p>
<p>I seem to have used 3 hands in writing about S, though. 
It will be interesting to watch how M evolves over time.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I agree except kids say there are no jobs after Ph D in physical/life sciences.</p>
<p>Quantmech, those “bottom quarter” & “bridge” ideas are based on very outmoded and long-since repudiated ideas about brain development, IQ, “potential”, the validity of the SAT in measuring “g” – etc. I’m sure that Harvard wants student who will be happy and adjust well, but I also think they are well aware by now – especially with much greater diversity over the years – that many of the “bottom quarter” students they admit end up graduating at the top of the class.</p>
<p>My daughter was admitted to her college with SAT scores in the bottom quarter, as well as to several other colleges that seemed like reaches at the time. She graduated summa cum laude – I don’t think that was some sort of mistake on the part of the ad com – I think that the essays & LOR’s reflected that my d. had a high level of drive & ambition and a tendency to stand out – and the ad coms at the respective colleges now know that EQ is as important a factor to success as IQ. (Not that my d. lacks in the latter – but the point is that all of those <em>soft</em> factors are also highly predictive of success - if my d. had +200 points on the SAT but an equivalent reduction in oomph factor, she would have been a different applicant and very likely would not have had much success in college apps. ).</p>
<p>A friend of mine who worked in Harvard admissions years ago remarked to me that Harvard was not necessarily looking for the brightest students, they were looking for those who would be most successful. There is no doubt that EQ plays a major role in success, in general.</p>
<p>Also, there appears to be a case that students who are “overachievers” in terms of test scores (lower) vs. performance (outstanding) are not merely drudges who are willing to put in a lot of extra effort, but may rather be some of the most creative people. Surely sometimes the colleges can recognize this.</p>
<p>Part of the idea of the “happy bottom quarter” at Harvard (according to their report) was that students in that group might well flourish and do very well in college–in fact, much better than their stats would indicate. I think this view is very much alive and well in admissions.</p>
<p>Creativity and a unique way of looking at the world are very valuable in the physical sciences. A datum often batted about is this: Richard Feynman had a tested IQ of 123 or 124.</p>
<p>All of that said, it is quite clear that Feynman was very, very smart. Looking at things through the lens of physics and mathematics, I think that no one accomplishes much of lasting importance in those fields without great gifts of intellect. Based on the data available to me, I hypothesize that some of the top schools may on occasion miss some of these students. My alternative hypothesis is that I know a total outlier in the admissions process, among QMP’s friends. The latter is possible, but it seems more likely to me to assume that I know a representative sub-set of results than a non-representative sub-set.</p>
<p>I’m sure that the admissions staff often misses many of those students – the admissions process is an art rather than a science, and a very inexact one at that. It also has a built in bias – looking for students who happened to bloom during their high school years. The world is full of late bloomers, of people whose true potential didn’t really start to develop and be apparent until their 20’s or later. </p>
<p>But I think you are on the same page about what Harvard and many colleges are looking for. Academic achievement and ability is only one piece of the puzzle.</p>
<p>
I believe in these “bad bounces,” too. I think it can happen strictly by chance, but I also think that it’s possible that multiple colleges might make the same mistake based on a misreading of something in an essay or recommendation. In other words, a recommendation that is intended to be highly positive, or a carefully crafted essay, may have some phrase in it that rings alarm bells for admissions committees.</p>
<p>I wonder whether some of the non-academic personal strengths of the top-stats group may be less evident to the teachers, because in a typical high school setting, the top-stats students may have less need to draw on their other strengths. If the student is also enrolled in university courses, the HS teachers generally don’t have any direct evidence of the areas where a student might be facing challenges or showing resilience.</p>
<p>No system for allocating scarce resources is perfect. We have an exceptionally nuanced and complex (and expensive) system, and I think it works pretty well, but bad bounces can happen here, no question. One of the strengths of our system, however, is that what happens when you “lose” on a bad bounce is pretty darn good.</p>
<p>Re post #452:</p>
<p>If Harvard was merely looking for the most intellectually capable students, it would be a problem that they were missing some under-the-radar students – the type that the high school teacher don’t notice because the kid quietly slips off every day for concurrent univrsity enrollment.</p>
<p>But Harvard, in particular, happens to be looking for students who will be future movers & shakers in society. Harvard highly values leadership & people skills – and it likes to have the type of student who draws attention to himself (or herself), whether naturally or with deliberate effort. Because unless there is a change or growth in personality, the smart kid who is invisible to his high school teachers is likely to some day end up as a worker who is invisible to his superiors, passed up for promotion while others get ahead. </p>
<p>So when you raise the very real issue that some very smart students aren’t drawing attention to themselves and therefore come up weak on the LOR front – you are right – but my point is that I don’t think Harvard and other elite colleges particularly want those students. They really don’t want the type of kid who will arrive at college, spend their free time studying in their dorm room and library, show up to class, get straight A’s… and nothing more. They want students who are engaged and active and will be creating the vibrant campus environment that is part of the elite campus experience. </p>
<p>Parents who really want their kids to get into elite colleges may want to help their shy or introverted offspring learn how to draw attention to themselves and their strengths & contributions in positive ways… its a life skill that pays off in many ways.</p>
<p>^ I am curious about this. From my perspective, I feel Harvard actually admits a lot of introverted people. I could be totally wrong.</p>
<p>I’m sure they do. </p>
<p>I don’t think the point was that they don’t admit introverts. I think the point was that they base admission decisions in part on LOR’s – and it has been suggested that some (not all) students are disadvantaged in the process because their high school teachers are not aware of their strengths, and fail to write strong letters of recommendation. </p>
<p>I’m just saying that Harvard (and similar schools), probably don’t care if they miss those particular students, because they are looking for applicants who stand out.</p>
<p>I’m not sure how common that is in any case, because as someone else noted, the student only needs 2 LOR’s. It’s hard to envision that no teachers at all notice the presence of a high power intellect in their midst.</p>
<p>calmom, I think it’s less that the teachers don’t recognize the student’s ability, and more that the teachers are poor communicators and don’t know how to express their recognition to colleges in an effective way.</p>
<p>An endorsement like “I gave him an A. He is an excellent student. He wrote about Jane Eyre in his term paper. I recommend that you admit him” is meaningless to colleges. CC parents know that, but plenty of HS teachers don’t, even in good school districts.</p>
<p>Well, the “you only have to find two teachers who ‘get’ what you are doing” strategy worked really well for QMP. On the other hand, QMP was lucky to have those two teachers in particular (teacher assignment is pretty random locally, as far as I can tell), and again lucky to have no constraints on the academic areas of the recommenders.</p>
<p>When I wrote about the teachers not being able to comment on the way that students cope with challenge, I wasn’t referring to a hypothetical student who skulked around the halls of the high school avoiding contact, and slipped off to the university for a number of classes, unbeknownst to anyone. I meant that if the only true challenges the student faces come from the college classes, the HS teachers can’t say much meaningful about how the student responds to challenge–because within the HS environment, the student doesn’t face them, really. </p>
<p>Depending on the college where the classes are taken, the introductory classes may be taught by foreign nationals, who see nothing unusual in taking university level calc-based physics as a high-school sophomore, because they covered the same material at age 12. In that case, the professor might not be the best person to write a letter of recommendation to an American college. QMP had 5 straight university semesters without a native English speaker in mathematics–although all spoke English quite well, they really weren’t acculturated.</p>
<p>I don’t know about the experience of others on this board, but in many high-schools, I think that student “leadership” accomplishes rather little, and it is often based on qualities that may not correlate with future leadership. (Again, sorry about the cynicism, and if you had different experiences, then I think that you are fortunate in the local schools.) I was surprised to discover that I actually had some qualities of leadership–and even more startled to discover that other people would actually follow my lead–beginning in college.</p>
<p>As mentioned before, I have no complaints about H–from the local school, H accepted all of the insightful scholars who applied there.</p>
<p>I just posted this on the class of 13 board but realize after catching up here (where I’ve also been quietly lurking lately) that this may also be a good place to ask, given the direction the conversation has gone. Given that LORs are important in conveying that extra something about a teen that cannot be conveyed with stats (and, as per one commenter above, could even sink an application if something subtle ‘sets off alarms’), how can one be sure that the people we are asking for LORs are the ones who are most enthusiastic about our children? Is there some code way of asking that lets the person know that you don’t want them if they don’t feel inspired enough to write something memorable? Is ‘memorable’ too much to ask of a HS teacher? My son’s teachers say nice things without prompting (we have a comments section on the report card that can remain blank) but how do I know if that translates into a really good LOR?</p>
<p>^^ MomofNEA-- You’re lucky you have the written comments-- you can see how well the teachers write, and if they really get something honest and compelling down on paper when they’re talking about your student. You can also guess (I’ve found) from parent-teacher conferences-- does the teacher really ‘get’ the kid? Does he or she drone on, or sparkle with understanding? D had one teacher who brought me in, sat me down, and told me 3 or 4 things that let me see she knew and appreciated D, and would be able to get that across. </p>
<p>But mainly-- I asked the GC-- he could discreetly suggest who really writes a good recommendation. I suggested several names and he said “How about A and D”…and I trust him. But you never really know-- the teacher who has been closest to D all this time, and for whom D really is a ‘teachers’ pet, didn’t really write a compelling letter. (She gave D a copy.) She’s just not a writer, that’s all-- but it would have been terrible not to ask her when she has been a wonderful mentor to D all these years.</p>