<p><a href=“jessiehl:”>quote</a> </p>
<p>Who cares (for purposes of this topic, anyway) what people from Caltech admissions said about their applicant pool? The Caltech applicant pool and the MIT applicant pool are not the same thing.
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<p>I think it would be a hard slog trying to convince people that:</p>
<p>a. Caltech differs drastically from MIT in its applicant demographics;</p>
<p>b. It is a fluke that Caltech’s experience accords with the familiar national trends; and</p>
<p>c. There are self-selection factors that shape MIT’s female applicant pool (in particular, factors that might reverse the sharp escalation in gender disparity that occurs at the high end of the distribution of mathy analytical credentials) but do not apply to Caltech’s applicant pool. It is already difficult enough to formulate a self-selection process that could have that effect at MIT considered alone, without also asking that it not have an equivalent effect at Caltech. </p>
<p>The only relevant difference I can imagine is that Caltech is so notoriously difficult that the male applicants also have a high degree of self-selection, even compared to MIT applicants, and thus the weaker SAT scores don’t appear in their pool at all. At MIT, which also has business and art and music majors, perhaps some low-scoring men apply more indiscriminately than women, and drive down the male average. At a school with an SAT math average above 750, it takes three perfect scores to balance out a single applicant who thinks he can get in with a 600, so any excess of low scores would be particularly effective in lowering the male average. However, the calculations in this thread are addressing the high scores and the upper tail of the credential distribution, and there men predominate in the national pool. What if anything could alter this in MIT’s pool and not Caltech’s is rather mysterious. </p>
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<p>The question has been about the applicant SAT-score distributions, not the accepted students. MIT has very little control on who the applicants are, so between the Caltech statements and the known national patterns, yes, I would say there is some evidence. Not conclusive evidence, but enough that speculating that “it might not be true at MIT” (an appeal to ignorance) or an admissions officer asserting but not quantifying the claim that “it’s not true” (an appeal to authority) are not sufficient to refute the suspicion.</p>