<p>there would be no more “human” touch to the admissions process, don’t you think? 
Personally, I’d like to think that if an admissions officer chuckled at my essay, I’d have a better chance of getting in. :)</p>
<p>Why does a college need a human admissions committee instead of a programmed computer? Why not go a step further? Why does a college need human students? Why not just program more computers to enter the work force?</p>
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<p>That has been going on for years and years, wherever it is possible.</p>
<p>well, to do that we would need a much more standardized college admissions process. For starters, it would help to have A TEST THAT ACTUALLY TESTS WHAT IS LEARNED IN SCHOOL.</p>
<p>College admissions in China can be done by computers easily (although humans are cheaper). It pretty much all comes down to your score on the gaokao, unless you have a special certificate (e.g. you were on the imo team).</p>
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<p>Each state is different though, and it might discriminate either for or against people in private schools and homeschooled students, who might have parents who go into more detail in some areas or less detail in others. I like your idea though; it’s kind of like the ACT exam. </p>
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<p>Why have people at all anywhere?</p>
<p>@ LOLhere - It is not true that English is easier to learn than Chinese. The ease or difficulty with which someone learns a language has a great deal to do with their native language. A person whose native language is Cantonese, for example, will have a much easier time learning Mandarin than English. A person whose native language is Spanish will have a much easier time learning French than English. To say that some languages (read: English) are easier to learn than others is very English-centric and simply inaccurate.</p>
<p>^I’m a native Chinese and I still find English way easier to learn.</p>
<p>^Agreed. You can learn any language, but if you wanna start analyzing literary works that’s a different story.</p>
<p>eliana–you are right up to a point. Esperanto is “easy” if you already know English or a Romance language…if your native language is Mandarin, Greek, or Finnish, it’s probably not the universal language for you.</p>
<p>But I have read essays (some very amusing) that explain why Chinese is SO difficult to learn (if you don’t hear it from birth)–from the “tones” that make words distinctive to the arcane writing system that makes it difficult to even look up words in the dictionary.</p>
<p>I actually read that CHINESE Universities rate the top 100 schools and they themselves do not put their schools in the top 20, so it really has NOTHING to do with knowing English or Chinese. [Academic</a> Ranking of World Universities - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Ranking_of_World_Universities]Academic”>Academic Ranking of World Universities - Wikipedia) </p>
<p>In fact, China didn’t place itself at all!</p>
<p>This is true. However, it is impossible to make a statement as general as “X language is easy/difficult to learn” because, as I said before, it depends almost entirely upon the learner’s first language. Those essays about the difficulty of Chinese, I assume, refer to the difficulty of Chinese for speakers of languages that are not tonal and are very different from Chinese. Please correct me if I’m wrong. In addition, it is generally accepted by linguists that no language is significantly more difficult than another for an infant to pick up. All human languages are picked up by infants that are immersed in them remarkably well, and English has no advantage over Chinese in this regard. So I suppose what I object to is the general statement “X is easier than Y.” Easier for whom? Certainly not easier for an infant who is picking up his or her native language, and similarly not easier for a person who speaks a language much closer to Y than X. I think we should be wary of making blanket statements like that one, because not only are they inaccurate, but they make it very easy to jump to an unsubstantiated conclusion about one language’s superiority to another.</p>
<p>You are correct that the writing system of Chinese is much more difficult to learn than a phonetic writing system with much fewer characters. However, spoken and written language are two entirely different things, and linguists make a point of this. Learning written Chinese is not the same as learning spoken Chinese; a baby picks up spoken Chinese and spoken English effortlessly, but writing must be taught. One of the most common mistakes made when analyzing a language is conflating speaking and writing.</p>
<p>^Sure… but it is generally agreed that spoken Mandarin is easier to learn than spoken Cantonese, since Mandarin only has 4 tones and has pinyin. </p>
<p>And with English, at least you can sound out words. With Chinese… umm… most of it is memorizing the word with the sound. </p>
<p>Maybe we should just test it once and for all on some remote tribe on whether Chinese or English is more difficult to learn =P </p>
<p>@Yurtle: That’s just ONE ranking system. By the way, I just looked at the rankings and they are so skewed. I probably don’t have to go more into this because it’s just so obvious…</p>
<p>And if you looked at the methodology, it’s very research based and has nothing to do with the quality of education</p>
<p>Besides, China is emerging as world power, so it needs more time to gain more recognition.</p>
<p>A good article on Lehigh University’s admissions details the adcom contributions to the process: [The</a> Lucky 13s](<a href=“http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/lehigh/alumni_2009fall/#/24]The”>http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/lehigh/alumni_2009fall/#/24)</p>
<p>From what I read here, most of the criteria in the selection process are in fact objective but not expressed as such because of legal constraints. I do a lot of programming and you would be amazed at the kind of complexity current computing power can handle. I do not think it would be difficult to come up with a model and program, which would closely replicate the current admission systems with the same amount of fuzziness in it.</p>
<p>The problem with that is that whichever remote tribe we pick, their language will inevitably have more in common with either English or Chinese. It may be a tonal language, for example, which many languages are, and it would be thus easy for a speaker to grasp the tonal changes in Chinese. And yes, of course the Chinese writing system is more difficult for an outsider to learn than that of English. I never contested that. But it is a simple fact that speaking and writing and ENTIRELY separate. Speaking is a natural, evolved human ability that we pick up natural at a very young age. Writing is not. Writing must be taught and consciously practiced, and the system in which Chinese is recorded has nothing to do with the language itself.</p>
<p>If you were on trial for murder (innocent but the “facts” look bad for you) would you want a computer deciding your fate?</p>
<p>If the facts look bad for you, would you want the committee to be deciding your fate?</p>
<p>If the facts look bad for you, would you want to be on trial? Err, I mean applying.</p>
<p>I would like it very much if a computer decided my fate, actually. Then the trial would never come down to “hmm, that witness’ crying seemed really sincere, therefore he’s probably guilty”.</p>
<p>My school simply looked at the scores (no essays, no affirmative action). My school has a good reputation in state. Certainly for engineering it has a better reputation than schools with comparable student bodies.</p>
<p>@LOLhere</p>
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<p>But, that ranking Method was put out BY China. China made THOSE ranks, and did not put ANY of their OWN Universities on the list. XD</p>