<p>liquidmetal, it seems like you think you've done very well academically. It also seems that you believe that if you can do it, a large number of other students should be able to perform at or above your level. I'm not a fan of that kind of thinking. Let me go through your last post.</p>
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The fact that my parents instilled in my values of education gives me an advantage over other applicants, but I still have to put in the effort whether my family was rich or poor.
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<p>So you've got high parental expectations and high personal drive. Some people, myself included, would argue that these two factors are very important for academic success in any high school for any American student. But the most important factor of these two seems to be high parental expectation. Teens generally live up to their parents' expectations, whether these expectations are "positive" or "negative." Sure, there's bursts of rebellion but after that's done, emerging adults tend to fulfill or at least attempt to fulfill the expectations of their parents. So while it's great that your parents instilled you with a desire to do well in school, many other kids do not have those kinds of parents. </p>
<p>When the parents don't seem to care about academic achievement, why should the kid? That's why, in my opinion, it is particularly noteworthy when a student comes from a family where academics are not valued and nevertheless manages to do fairly well in school and on the SAT. By fairly well I mean somewhere above the 75% percentile of California high school seniors. Why not give such students a leg-up in the admissions process, especially if they are poor or otherwise disadvantaged? </p>
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The real problem I have is that AA is too powerful. If some URM posts for a private school that practices AA, say Stanford adn they have the stock GPA (close to 4) and an SAT score just above 2100 everybody says good/excellent shot.
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<p>This of it this way. Stanford is a kind of like a corporation. Corporations are generally allowed to choose the criteria on which they hire employees. Why should Stanford be kept from choosing students on whatever criteria it chooses? You might say because we live in America and we're supposed to be equal damn it. Sad truth is that we're not equal right now and one of the best way to "remedy" the situation, as far as some private universities are concerned, is to have race-based AA. By the way, if you think race-based AA is "too powerful" just wait until they start doing sexual orientation-based AA. I'm pretty sure it's already happening to be honest. There are of course other types of AA in the works - some people think Berkeley has too many undergraduate women. </p>
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Lastly Karabear, you talk about hardworking ppl from lower class backgrounds. Well, I don't know how you can tell if they are hardworking or not...So a poor kid without a job on the application is more hard working than a person from a higher economic class working a few jobs and doing a lot of comm. service? Maybe, but its inconclusive again. You cannot just assume that poor ppl who have decent test scores are more hardworking than rich counterparts.
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<p>Well there's no doubt about it - it's tough to know with any perfect degree of objectivity whether student A has worked harder than B when controlling for educational environment. This is an imperfect process but it does I think provide plenty of sources of information on which the imperfect decisions can be made with SOME mid-to-high degree of objectivity. There's the grades, scores, extracurriculars, awards, essays, work experience, etc. It's clear to me that the comprehensive review system allows the admissions people to get a pretty good idea of the applicant and I have a feeling the application and its assessment portray the applicant in a fairly accurate way. But there are ways to tighten it up - like running random checks on people's extracurriculars and speaking to their supervisors. </p>
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To get a test score good enough to be admitted here you honestly dont need to go to a good or even decent HS (SAT Material is covered in pretty much any HS).
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<p>You have proof of this? There was an article in a Long Beach newspaper some time ago regarding an entire class of sophomores who went without English teachers for an entire year because the English teachers couldn't get a good bargain from the general teacher's union. I'm pretty sure most of those kids, who were primarily poor URMs did not get ANY SAT prep that school year. </p>
<p>Even if some SAT prep is provided in "pretty much any HS" it might be of very low quality in certain high schools. It's easy to imagine an overworked and underpaid teacher getting up in front of a class and running through the Princeton Review's SAT Hit Parade - but as I hope you'll agree, memorizing those two hundred or so words does not help much in the real SAT or even the PSAT. Yet, the students, even the "bright" ones in the class, are probably fooled into thinking that the kind of prep they're getting is actually of high value. And why wouldn't they think that? It's not like they tend to have a comparison group. Trust me, there are probably no competitions among classrooms in Compton High School to see which classroom can memorize the most SAT words. By contrast, it's my understanding that say Harvard-Westlake High School often promulgates such academic rivalry.</p>
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If you are smart enough to handle the workload here then you should be smart enough to obtain a prep book set
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<p>"Smart" kids in high school don't always turn out "smart" in college and sometimes "dumb" kids become the "smart" kids. So I'm not sure doing that if a Berkeley student is "smart enough" to handle Berkeley workload means that the same student, in high school, had the same relative level of smartness which might be necessary to obtain a prep book. Do you not agree? </p>
<p>As a sidenote, there are plenty of courses at Berkeley which, in my opinion, are considerably easier than the vast majority of courses students (even "bad" ones) took in high school. So even then, in selecting a class, it might be fruitful to know the students' intended fields. I hate to stereotype but I have a very hard time imagining anybody, other than a proud Republican, doing badly in Berkeley's ethnic studies courses. So if an applicant from high school clearly wants to pursue ethnic studies, why in the world does their SAT math score matter?</p>
<p><a href="%7E60%20bucks%20total/40%20bucks%20used%20or%20perhaps%20free%20if%20you%20have%20friends%20or%20connections%20at%20school">quote</a> and read through that.
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<p>How can you have connections at school if your peer culture doesn't foster SAT prep?</p>
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Thats what I did for my SAT; its almost like a cheat sheet i felt. Read the book, get a top score. Worked for all my SAT's.
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<p>You're just one person - how do you know this method will work for other students? Some students do precisely what you did and never manage to get into Berkeley.</p>