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<p>I will just add that you’re mistake-prone on very strictly timed tests where it can be hard to check yourself. But yes, I agree with this - while I always scored well above 700 on math, I tend to make a few mistakes the first time and have to correct myself. Both on SATs and GREs, I scored worst on math and closer to perfect or perfect on the other two. This has affected me less when studying mathematics that is “slow-paced” enough that almost everyone has to check himself/herself, and where composing a long, coherent argument is the name of the game.</p>
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<p>While it’s not directed at me, I’ll just pitch in briefly what I think: I think the answer is no on average, but that there are sufficiently many factors other than how smart or productive someone is governing admission to many such schools that aside from the very best of the best of the best, a lot of the talent gets scattered to less competitive schools (including other Ivy Leagues and state schools).</p>
<p>I’ll throw in there that I know plent of brilliant people who went into Stanford. However, these type of people wre more automatic at Caltech and MIT (though MIT has gotten more unpredictable.) </p>
<p>Sometimes anecdotes are powerful when you know these people personally. I know a guy who was very distinguished as a musician (state level) and in math and physics (top 100 in country) with great grades and scores, also a very nice guy with some other ECs. He got rejected from Harvard and Stanford. I’ve been around science and math a long time, and however many of Gardner’s dimensions of intelligence you want to plot, you aren’t going to find enough people with intelligence vectors greater than this guy to justify his rejection. One of Stanford’s more successful recent graduates that I know was rejected from Harvard, and he was very distinguished as a high schooler, much more than people I know who graduated phi beta kappa from MIT. Some talented people are scattered as mathboy says because a lot of people max out on the grades/scores, but there are some awards that are very tough to get and are highly predictive of success, MOP/IMO for instance.</p>
<p>It’s a heterogeneous mixture at places like HYP in my opinion, but I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree.</p>
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<p>You don’t think there’s any room for just not being good at taking sit-down exams?</p>
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<p>I think Stanford does - the focus of admissions has for a long time focused on ‘[intellectual</a> vitality](<a href=“http://www.stanford.edu/dept/uga/basics/selection/index.html]intellectual”>http://www.stanford.edu/dept/uga/basics/selection/index.html)’ (something that other universities look for too, but I think it accounts for many of the ‘odd’ decisions that Stanford is famous for). The required essay on it has been in Stanford’s app for at least 15 years.</p>
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<p>I don’t think that grades are necessarily indicative of one’s intelligence - you could get a B for a poorly-made exam, etc. While it’s true that often students are admitted for ECs and such, Stanford still stresses intellectual vitality over all. That to me is probing for different forms of intelligence.</p>
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<p>Setting aside again the difficulty of the word ‘smart’ and focusing on what I think you mean: I don’t think on average, but a subset of them are. Public schools also have a ‘tail’ of students where this isn’t the case. But at a certain size, diminishing returns set in and you max out on student intelligence, and thus being smaller doesn’t make your students more elite on average. For example, Princeton and Yale are smaller than Stanford and Harvard, but I wouldn’t say that makes their students more intelligent on average (the “tail” at these schools - from the difference in size - is a bit different from the “tail” at public universities). I don’t think the students at Swarthmore are more intelligent than the students at MIT because it’s smaller. Nor do I believe Harvey Mudd College has slightly more intelligent students than Caltech because it’s marginally smaller than Caltech. </p>
<p>If you still think Caltech is more elite because it’s smaller, I’ll add that Caltech loses the overwhelming majority of its cross-admits with MIT and Stanford, suggesting that it’s left with those who couldn’t get into MIT or Stanford or didn’t apply. It’s hard to say, though.</p>
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<p>See, I don’t see it quite the same way. At Stanford you have a wider variety of interests/backgrounds. There’s an overwhelming perception among people that brilliance seems to be only in STEM areas. One can also show brilliance in the humanities, arts, social sciences, etc. but these areas aren’t as ‘impressive’ to most. So people are more willing to write them off.</p>
<p>I have plenty of anecdotes as well, but I don’t think they prove anything.</p>
<p>GO to MIT … Period!</p>
<p>I don’t know how big the correlation between SAT and intelligience is. Some brilliant people might have a low SAT score and attend a less famous college, but he or she might be smarter than most of the people admitted to HYPSM and caltech. </p>
<p>I doubt the following people had a very high SAT score when entering college. But no one can deny their intelligience.</p>
<p>Alan Kay, Turing award winner, attended University of Colorado at Boulder
Theodo Maiman, inventor of first working LASER, attended University of Colorado at Boulder
Larry Page, Google founder, attened University of Michigan
Sergy Brin, Google founder, attended University of Maryland
Ted Hoff, inventor of microprocessor, attended RPI
John Cioffi, DSL pioneer, attended UIUC
John Hopcroft, Turing award winner, attended Seatle University
John Hennessy, RISC pioneer, president of Stanford, attended Vinanova University
David Patterson, RISC pioneer, attended UCLA
Don Knuth, Turing award winner, attended Case Institute of Technology
…</p>
<p>SAT might predict the learning ability effectively. BUt I highly doubt it can predict creativity effectively.</p>
<p>It is true that sometimes brilliance in the humanities, arts and social sciences can be written off. However, I believe the same phenomenon responsible for this might be responsible for a lot of other writing off. </p>
<p>One major contributing factor to that writing-off seems to be that scoring well on hard exams which have “objective right answers” is just an easy way of potentially measuring an applicant in STEM. Of course, we all know this is a single measure, but nevertheless, the fact it exists prominently seems to be a contributing factor to that image. It is easier for the majority to write off an achievement awarded on subjective grounds.</p>
<p>There is one other writing-off which seems to occur. Which is that, as collegealum suggests, a large batch of the good students who max out on grades and scores but do not also have an award (IMO medal) and do not have significant EC involvement or aren’t prodigies in some other way get written off as the same.</p>
<p>This is partially a result of the same phenomenon, which is that there is an ocean of STEM out there, and there is a ton of variation in the middle, i.e. between someone who can get an A in calculus and electrodynamics, and someone who wins an IMO medal or solves an open problem baffling modern researchers, in terms of motivation, knack, etc, but a lot of these abilities are hard to screen for because there’s no clear objective measure that marks the achievement.</p>
<p>I think all this is a significant contributing factor to intelligent people scattering in various places. </p>
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<p>This is true. Creativity is difficult to predict, period, without knowing the person’s mind up close, and even then no easy task.</p>
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<p>But for CS, Stanford is unbeatable. And for information technology and high tech, Silicon Valley >>>> Boston.</p>
<p>The prototypical HYPS admit has high scores, gets a high GPA, and is very active in the community. Deep thinking does not seem to be a big asset even if that person has high scores/GPA, unless you can win nationally recognized awards (and as I’ve seen, sometimes that is not even enough). If a candidate does not have high scores, then they have to be active in the community or a recruitable athlete.</p>
<p>The conceit at these schools is that they need some brainiacs out of necessity, but that being smart beyond getting A’s in one’s classes does not make one successful in pursuits other than academia. As they say, as long as you can “do the work”, and Harvard estimates that 90% of applicants can “do the work.” It doesn’t seem like a very high bar.</p>
<p>Steven Chu types (Nobel Laureate and current energy secretary who used to daydream in high school rather than do schoolwork) tend not to get into any top schools. Another example is the kid who built a working nuclear reactor in his basement but had spotty grades. Both these guys went to average state schools.</p>
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<p>That’s MIT too, as far as I’ve seen.</p>
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<p>Yeah, I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on that.</p>
<p>Andrew Fire is an interesting case - he was rejected from Stanford as an undergrad, went to Berkeley, then ended up as a prof at Stanford and won the Nobel in 2006.</p>
<p>mathboy98, I was thinking the same - that those in HASS fields often don’t get the recognition for their brilliance because HASS is subjective, and there’s no way to objectively see brilliance in an essay or whathaveyou. Then again, the same could be said of STEM, but at least there the ‘basic’ intelligence is a bit less subjective.</p>
<p>I will add in that deep thinkers get missed by top state schools too. I’ve found those who took lots of AP classes and simply had a very high GPA, and did well on their basic tests got into top state schools with high frequency. Someone who is the one who always knows way more in physics class and has a real knack and love for it (in a way that the teacher notices easily) might get missed, because maybe they’re not ranked in the top 20 in terms of class GPA (even if they had respectable results in all their classes).</p>
<p>Whereas by my philosophy, such an individual is exactly the kind I would like to see admitted, because when you give them a full four years to explore that discipline at a very respected department, he/she will probably make terrific use of it, and also succeed at the major more than many of those ranked in the top 20 GPA-wise. </p>
<p>There is always a problem when you judge someone for step N + 1 based on their performance in step N.</p>
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<p>Agree. But unfortunately, we have been doing that and have to do that. There is no other better choice. Using past to predict future. It is called forecast. To make an accurate forecast, we have to use multiple predictors. SAT and class rank are not sufficient for a good prediction. At least, GPA, SAT suject tests, passion, creativity, perseverance, and dedication should be factored in.</p>
<p>Using the past to help gauge the future seems pretty unavoidable, yes. I was thinking though that what we use to gauge the future can hopefully be made to correlate with the future’s needs more. </p>
<p>For instance, I would probably not judge someone’s potential to be a CS major based on choice of liking tennis or basketball, no matter what surveys or statistics say. </p>
<p>Similarly, when admitting someone to college, I would probably look for an overall intellectually curious person who shows a great knack and love for one or a few intellectual pursuits first.</p>
<p>Re datalook’s post #105: I can’t say about most of the people on your list, but I suspect that Larry Page and Sergey Brin had quite high SAT scores. There are quite a few articles on the Internet with comments that Google asks about prospective employees’ SAT scores, when the people being hired are in their mid-30’s. A reasonably reliable source for this is Ira Flatow’s Science Friday of September 16, 2011, with the transcript available online.</p>
<p>You think they didn’t have high SAT scores, just because they didn’t attend the very top universities?</p>
<p>^ that was probably a long time ago when they were elitist about their hiring (only going for those who went to elite universities, etc.). Google job applications don’t currently ask that. (I definitely don’t remember that at all when I applied.)</p>
<p>I think it’s equally absurd to assume that because the hiring managers might ask about SAT scores, Brin and Page must have had high SAT scores.</p>
<p>From what I’ve heard, Page asked about them.</p>
<p>My guess is that Page (at least) and probably Brin also had quite high SAT scores–the indications are fairly clear that they used the SAT scores to screen employees, at least in the early years of the company. I am guessing this because in general, people who put high reliance on SAT scores tend to have had high SAT scores themselves.</p>
<p>I heard that Wall Street does the same thing, or at least used to. </p>
<p>It does make some sense because there are ways to slide through many top schools with a good GPA, and also because there are some people who are admitted to top schools for reasons other than intellectual prowess.</p>
<p>“Stanford or MIT”</p>
<p>Is it possible that the two are so different that in 20-30 years one is more different than the other? I thought they were after different kinds of applicants.</p>
<p>Quick skimming suggests that the reliance on SAT scores in Google hiring was covered both in the book “I’m Feeling Lucky,” by Douglas Edwards (Google employee #59) and in the book “In the Plex,” by Stephen Levy. I haven’t been able to determine so far whether it is included in Ken Auletta’s “Googled.”</p>
<p>Haven’t read the CC terms of service lately, but I am pretty certain that online gambling is “streng verboten.” So I can’t offer any terms here. Nevertheless, among my local friends, I’d be happy to offer a purely friendly, non-monetary wager that Page’s SAT score was 1550 or higher–before the writing component was included on the SAT I, and before the re-centering boosted the scores, as well.</p>
<p>QuantMech’s post suggests a larger point: people who are in charge of selecting candidates for a position will often choose a selection criteria which they themselves would be selected by. In other words, the admissions committees will favor candidates which remind them of themselves…</p>