<p>I really think pepperdine will be equal to stanford and ucb in the future</p>
<p>Yes silverturtle, its what I mean. I’m puzzled. Isn’t it written clearly? It’s what I believe.</p>
<p>Only luck is true. I/some people call it luck. Others call it an act of Providence. Religious people call is the works of God.</p>
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<p>Did I suggest otherwise? I questioned the sincerity of your comment, which I consider to be absurd.</p>
<p>Why is it absurd, silverturtle? How can you measure intelligence? Through AP scores? SAT tests? IQ tests? Those answers are meaningless. Some tests devised by mere humans mean nothing.
The reason why one person may be “better off” from another is simply because of luck. It’s what I believe.</p>
<p>George Bush was simply lucky to have been born into such an influential family and thus got into Yale with “subpar stats.” My friends who were rejected at Yale with 2400 SAT and 4.9 GPA were rejected because they weren’t lucky. Its as simple as that.</p>
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Well, the answers obvious now. We need IQ Tests made by GOD to really measure intelligence.</p>
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Maybe with lottery winners and professional gambling.</p>
<p>Alright, ripemango, think about this scenario: You submit in your application for Duke or Yale or w/e. You have perfect 2400 SAT, 4.0 GPA, your passionate stuff, etc, etc. You feel proud and you hope for great news.
Meanwhile, adcoms are making decisions. For some reason the adcom who picked up your essay had a bad day (girlfriend broke up? previous application was terrible/a joke? His mother died? He ran out of beer? He’s loosing sleep? His mad at his boss?) and he decided to reject you for some reason influenced by his current state. Why are you the victim? Its unfair! That’s simply because you were unlucky.
I’ve talked to Dean Cristoph Guttentag many times. This is a shortened version of what he used to tell me.</p>
<p>ripemango, take ANY situation in life. You should question the outcome. At one point you’ll not understand why something happened the way it did. For that, I (you don’t have to) point my answer to luck. :)</p>
<p>i agree with silverturtle and ripemango. some people are more intelligent than others. it has nothing to do with admission to colleges. that isn’t what is being talked about here.</p>
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<p>Just because something is not objectively measurable in a completely agreeable manner does not mean that that something does not exist to varying degrees. I think that everyone would agree that some species are more intelligent than others (humans versus plants, for example). There is no reason that beings within a species cannot have different levels of intelligence.</p>
<p>I don’t mean intelligence doesn’t exist. I’m just asking how can you measure it? And please stick to human beings. Including plants and animals is a completely different topic.
And even if you can somehow measure intelligence, what does it mean? Will they be more “successful” in life? And why is this person more intelligent than the other? </p>
<p>To me the answer is simple: its luck. All I’m saying is that being more intelligent than George Bush doesn’t matter. First off, I don’t even know what that means as I can’t strictly measure intelligence. All I know is that George Bush is very lucky. </p>
<p>mickjagger: I’m not talking about college admissions only. I’m talking about life. And fine, even if you somehow prove to me that you can measure intelligence and prove one is smarter that the other, then I ask why is he smarter? Again, he was just lucky.</p>
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<p>As silverturtle pointed out: really bad logic.</p>
<p>Ah, TheSaiyans666, it appears as though my initial concerns about your sincerity were true. You don’t believe what you wrote (i.e., “There is no such thing as one person being more intelligent than the other.”).</p>
<p>… how absurd legacy admits can be. The man has never read a book in his life. And I’m not even a bureau… errr, democrat.</p>
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<p>But from the point of view of the college, legacy admissions clearly worked. Yale can count another President amongst its alumni for admitting GWBush through legacy admissions. If they had not done so, then either he would have presumably graduated from another college and become President, hence enhancing the prestige of that college, or Bush would have never become President at all and somebody else - who would likely not have been a Yale graduate - would have become President. </p>
<p>If anything, the problem is with us voters, or perhaps more accurately, with our political systems. Both of Bush’s Presidential electoral opponents, Gore and Kerry, were also admitted to Harvard or Yale because they were scions of powerful, well-connected families - Gore being the son of a sitting Senator, and Kerry belonging to the Boston Brahmin Forbes family. Both were also bred in boarding schools at a time when they were preserves of the elite. Both were also notably subpar students, with Gore placing in the bottom 20th percentile of students at Harvard for his first two years, and Kerry scoring a lower cumulative grade average at Yale that was actually lower than Bush’s. </p>
<p>[Gore’s</a> Grades Belie Image of Studiousness (washingtonpost.com)](<a href=“http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A37397-2000Mar18]Gore’s”>http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A37397-2000Mar18)</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/08/politics/08kerry.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/08/politics/08kerry.html</a></p>
<p>Yet the bottom line is, whatever advantages they may have enjoyed in being admitted to the top colleges, and however mediocre their academic performance was while there, the fact remains that primary voters dictated that they should be the party nominees in 2000 and 2004. In other words, it worked.</p>
<p>Methinks schools rise faster when they have money to fund expensive top-knotch programs. With that in mind, it makes sense that the private school system would be significantly more prestigious than schools in the public school system (what with all those rich and successful alumni) </p>
<p>Plus, schools like Stanford and MIT started out with big endowments.</p>
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<p>Really? Both Stanford and MIT endured severe financial reverses in their early years. Jane Stanford was reduced to pawning her own jewelry to meet Stanford’s expenses, and early Stanford administrators openly fretted at the prospect of competing against the (at the time) lavishly funded public university across the Bay. MIT was reduced to requesting what was effectively public bailout funds from the Massachusetts State legislature. To secure its financial footing, MIT proposed to merge with Harvard several times in the early 1900’s, only to be blocked by alumni or the courts. MIT became truly financially stable only in the 1910’s - a half-century after its founding - when George Eastman donated the funding for the land on which the current campus now resides.</p>
<p>Returning briefly to the question of what the Ivies imply…
Silly youth! (Sorry, but I’m feeling rather ancient just now…)
The Ivies were not about intellect for a very long time. They were (and in some ways still are) about the upper class in America. Admissions had little to do with grades or intellect, and much more to do with family. The youth of the Boston Brahmin went to the Ivies because that’s where the Boston Brahmin went to college, just as they went to certain prep schools, and eventually, to Mount Auburn cemetary. (and some still do)
If you want to know more, go pick up any social history of New England (or , indeed, early America). Re-read “Great Gatsby” and ruminate on why the rich are different.</p>
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The previous application being a joke would make yours look better. A family member dying wouldn’t make him “take it out” on an applicant, you silly goose. Ran out of beer? I hope your kidding. Losing sleep, maybe. But anyway, most top schools have two officers look at an application and discuss it before any decisions are made. Once again, winning the lottery and scoring big in Blackjack at Mohegan Sun are the things you can attribute to luck, not college admissions.</p>
<p>^Please read “On Writing the College Application Essay” by Harry Bauld.</p>
<p>You’d be surprised</p>
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<p>The problem is not entirely one of measurement. We can measure many things, more or less well, that seem to have something to do with intelligence. But what do we mean by intelligence in the first place? Is there more than one kind of intelligence? If so, which kind is most worth having in a freshman class? This is a matter of judgement as well as one of measurement. It concerns matters of value as well as matters of degree. [Theory</a> of multiple intelligences - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences]Theory”>Theory of multiple intelligences - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>Some people do think there is a single general intelligence factor that affects all cognitive abilities. This seems to be a premise underlying much intelligence testing. [General</a> intelligence factor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_intelligence_factor]General”>g factor (psychometrics) - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>Then there are issues of knowledge. We can try to measure knowledge, but again, this presumes we can identify in the first place what kind of knowledge is most worth having. ([The</a> Knowledge Most Worth Having - Google Books](<a href=“The Knowledge Most Worth Having - Google Books”>The Knowledge Most Worth Having - Google Books))</p>
<p>Schools will rise or fall in prestige depending to some degree on how they address these questions. For example, as technical knowledge grows in importance (and market value) schools that excel in providing it (Stanford, CMU) have become more prestigious.</p>