<p>mini Few posts ago you said:"I could care less who private prestige colleges admit"</p>
<p>Mini speaks from Mt Olympia. He can say what pleases him at the time.</p>
<p>Mini, </p>
<p>Take one of your poinnts and explain how the "evidence" supports the point.</p>
<p>Copied here for your convience:</p>
<p>""Evidence? Gordon Winston at Williams found there were three times as many high-achieving low-income students, achieving at a level of current prestige college admits, than were actually admitted to prestige colleges."</p>
<p>What, the heck, is this supposed to prove?"</p>
<p>It means they don't get in, they aren't recruited, the schools make no contacts with GCs, the financial aid isn't good enough, or they don't even apply. It's a funny kind of "welcome".</p>
<p>More like the Oracle at Delphi.</p>
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Marite,</p>
<p>What is the fact that your S's essays & EC's were apolitical supposed to prove?
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</p>
<p>What Simba said. </p>
<p>I've read quite a few essays written by students on CC; some were posted on the boards, others were sent to me by PM. The overwhelming majority have nothing to do with political attitudes. One was on jogging; another was on trying to get along better with an immigrant father; another was a fickle roommate in summer camp, and so on and so forth. My S's essays on taking part in a science competition; on a skit performed at a summer camp; and on writing web fiction are in that category.</p>
<p>Even though an essay doesn't relate specifically to a political topic, it's often apparent where a person stands politically/socially from their writing.</p>
<p>Marite and Simba,</p>
<p>Ok, most people write apolitical essays. Is there and argument going on here to which that is a point of contention? I quess I missed it. If the argument is that when confronted with a political essay adcoms would favor the more liberal opionion, I know what I believe. This would be a hard point to prove one way or the other.</p>
<p>Curious:</p>
<p>I don't know why it's so difficult to see that I was responding specifically to the point made by Anothervoice--which I quoted.</p>
<p>Another voice: My own experience suggests it's impossible to detect from most of the essays what their authors' political sympathies are. And I have read quite a few essays.</p>
<p>Marian, </p>
<p>I know you posted this AM, but I just saw this thread. (Sorry for the off-topic, folks!) I don't see why CB shouldn't develop an AP Multivariable exam. There were 57,319 students who took the BC Calc exam last year, which places AP BC at #13 among the AP exams out of 36. There are many exams that are offered to far fewer kids. CS, Physics, many of the languages, studio art...</p>
<p>Of the total of AP BC Calc exams, 16,291 were taken by juniors and younger -- the potential pool of students who would still be in HS to take an AP MV exam after taking the BC. Given that the mean score for seniors is 3.6, the mean for juniors is 4.03 and my calculation of the younger kids is 3.9 (backed this out from overall average), the kids getting to BC Calc before senior year do better on the exam and thus may be better prepared to do well in MV. 41.6% of kids earned a 5 on last year's exam.</p>
<p>To me, it seems that a MV exam would be appropriate -- there is so little else to measure math ability among the APs, unlike the science and social sciences exams, for example.</p>
<p>CD:</p>
<p>Some schools offer MV Calc but there are a tiny minority of schools. The majority of students who want to study MVCalc and LA either do so online or attend college classes. In either case, they have final exams to validate what they have learned. Granted that not all college classes are equal, still, it should be able for adcoms to determine from attendance alone that these students are very advanced in math. At to future placement, they can be administered math placement tests upon arrival at their colleges or talk their way into more advanced classes.</p>
<p>cd: AP Calc does not test math ability rather achievement in calculus. Tests such as the AMC and AIME do a better job at assessing math aptitude. The variation on these for kids scoring 5's on the BC calc are quite broad and interesting.</p>
<p>I think people who want a harder admissions test make the mistake of thinking that schools want the most intelligent students, when what most of them really want from the SAT or ACT is to find out who is smart enough. For even the most selective schools, an SAT score of 700 on a section (or even lower) shows them that the student has enough intelligence to do the work that will be required, and that's what they're looking for. After you make the first cut, they look for other qualities that appeal (or don't appeal) to them.</p>
<p>Anothervoice,</p>
<p>That depends on what you mean by most selective.</p>
<p>Anothervoice,</p>
<p>At HYPSMC it would be surprising to see a non legacy, non urm, or non recruited athlete admitted with scores averaging 700. For the rest of the candidates an average of 750 is pretty commonplace.</p>
<p>I chose 700 because that generally reflects the lower end of the middle 50% of scores for HYPS. I don't know how many legacies, athletes, and urms the ultra selective schools admit, but I'm guessing that it isn't more than 25% of each class. These schools could fill their classes with highly-accomplished students with perfect or nearly perfect scores and GPAs, so that obviously isn't their desire.</p>
<p>Anothervoice,</p>
<p>I am sorry that I don't remember the source but I have heard that the % is between 30 and 40, which makes the lower tail irrelevant for students who are not in one of these groups.</p>
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I don't know how many legacies, athletes, and urms the ultra selective schools admit, but I'm guessing that it isn't more than 25% of each class.
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</p>
<p>This is an underestimate for some schools.</p>
<p>At Columbia, which I believe had the lowest acceptance rate in the country this year, URMs alone make up 25% of the student body (according to demographic information on the College Board Web site).</p>
<p>At Harvard for example the top 25% (who represent just slightly less than half of the non-preferenced admits) had scores at or above 1580 (1600 scale). A non-preferenced student with scores averaging 700 is toast in this competition.</p>
<p>
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I don't know how many legacies, athletes, and urms the ultra selective schools admit, but I'm guessing that it isn't more than 25% of each class.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>The problem here is one of overlap. There is no reason to believe that students who belong to one or more of these categories do not also have high scores.
For ex., the sal of my S's class is a legacy at H, where he is now enrolled. The sal of an earlier class was a legacy at Yale, where he graduated a couple of years ago. Two URMs (siblings) are legacies at Harvard and Yale and are also high scorers. And so on.</p>
<p>Marite,</p>
<p>Since no one will release this data I guess we will never know.</p>