<p>Also things have to be taken into context. For example, I had been programming pretty seriously as a hobby for over 10 years before I applied. But you can't just say "I program for fun" and expect people to take you seriously. You have to have stuff to show for it. So I had several pretty sophisticated projects (chess engine, 3d flight simulator, web crawler, AI prototype attempts, large biological simulation engines, etc) that I could show to my interviewer and my teachers so that they mentioned it on their recommendations. Of course this isn't something you can do as you are applying, because people will pick up right away what you are trying to get them to do. But if you are truly into something, then over time people who know you will understand how good you are at it, etc. And recommendations will reflect that. Remember, anyone can write anything on their application. But if you can back it up through demos, recommendations, etc etc that all zero in on the same few things then adcoms will put much more faith in it.</p>
<p>differential, I continue to be disappointed with your statement. Life may give unequal endowments but all of us everywhere have a grave obligation to try to be fair. By fair I mean absence of injustice, presence of justice, I do not wish to define it, like Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography, you know unfairness and injustice when you see it. This is not leveling the playing field, yes, the kid across the hall may be a math genius and get things done effortlessly, so the two kids are unequal but if they have same opportunities and access as far as possible then justice is served. No, I am not asking MIT or any college to imagine that the poor Appalachian kid if given this and that and that will be equal to someone else who excelled because he had advantages and therefore should be given equal weight. All of us, especially adcoms can recognize where someone has gained an unfair advantage or has had unfair disadvantage. Example of first kind: parent is researcher at Dana Farber, kid does research at Dana Farber, not that it should be therefore rejected, but view it with skepticism and in the context of everything else about the kid. Example of latter: kid excels but courses are not strong because school does not offer any better.</p>
<p>pebbles, yes, that was a sweeping statement by Watson but I am convinced by the data provided by Jensen and Murray. Racial differences in intelligence are significant and we must be open to the possiblity that they are not the result of environment alone. Something else is at work. Possibly genetic.</p>
<p>tokenadult, well put. When my S was in HS, he deliberately chose activities he would continue to do if HYP had already admitted him (so he did not have to continue doing it) or put it another way, if he would not be permitted to cite them in his apps. So, he said to heck with community service , did zero, he was not into it, no ECs except tennis. All he did was academics and tennis, no job, no summer ECs, I thought he would get in nowhere, made it to all Ivies except HYP, and no Stanford or MIT. Baffles me! But he was not pressured at all, school was relaxing.</p>
<p>
Oh dear, yes. Don't listen to me before I have my Mountain Dew in the morning.</p>
<p>
I would say that Mollie is echoing Matt, a little more accurately. :)</p>
<p>
Do we really have to start this again? Nobody doubts the data -- it's there. It exists. But most (non-right-wing) people disagree with Jensen/Herrnstein/Murray's fabulous confusion of correlation with causation. If IQ is genetic and meaningful, then why is it more heritable among high-SES individuals than low-SES individuals?</p>
<p>Don't even get me started on Watson. He's just an offensive human being.</p>
<p>I never really got the taste of mountain dew ... too damn sugary...</p>
<p>"Example of first kind: parent is researcher at Dana Farber, kid does research at Dana Farber, not that it should be therefore rejected, but view it with skepticism and in the context of everything else about the kid. "</p>
<p>Yeah, but the problem with that is that there is some genetic component of inheriting intelligence (sorry I have to disagree with you Mollie.) If a kid's parent is a professional scientist, probably the kids are going to be good too. I mean, often you hear about athletes and you find out their parents are also famous athletes, many times in different sports. Yes, there is a cultural advantage and also it's easy for them to get their kid the job (although it's not that tough to walk in and volunteer somewhere as long as you are geographically near a lab or university.) For example, there is a postdoc in my lab whose kid worked in the same lab for the summer when she was 15. According to my advisor, she was really great in lab and also was very quick in picking up what would be the next experiment that should be run. </p>
<p>At any rate, I wouldn't regard them with more skepticism. However, doing research really isn't that hard to begin with. At age 18, I think a far more important predictor of long-term success in research would be their test scores and performance in class. Unless the student did something really unusual, I would only use it as a tiebreaker. However, most of the time when high school students do something outstanding in research, the rest of their record is pretty bulletproof so it's a moot point.</p>
<p>I don't think Mollie is advancing the very radical claim that intelligence isn't heritable. I think she's saying that in our measurement of intelligence, factors like economic advantage often overwhelm the underlying intelligence variable which we would like to measure. That seems very reasonable and, in fact, true.</p>
<p>There's a huge conceptual difference between denying that something (in this case, intelligence) EXISTS or is heritable and denying that we can measure small differences in it well enough to base big decisions on small differences in measurements. I'm pretty sure Mollie would make the second claim, not the first. Let's see what Mollie thinks.</p>
<p>My personal view is that there are probably group-level intelligence differences (just as there are height differences...), but they may well be the reverse of what people naively think they are, and we'll have to wait a while to know. (In a recent study of infants, for example, Asian babies actually performed slightly worse than white and black babies on simple cognitive tests.) In the meantime, reserving judgment and not putting too much stock in these claims about genetic group-level differences is likely to lead to a more equitable society.</p>
<p>Ok, here is what I don't get. Everyone wants to say a kid is like the parents because of genetics, right? Well isn't this notion a little ignorant? The parents did raise the kid right? The parents and their 'ways' were apart of the child's early programming. This is the same as the bio-rythms of the mother's circulatory system, respiration, digestion, nutrient feed, etc. having an effect on pre-natal neurological developement. Genes are very important I will not doubt this, but SO many more things contribute to heritage.</p>
<p>My point is heritable does not necessarily mean genetic. Especially when you consider the child is picking up habits, patterns and 'ways' already used by those pocessing similar genotype. This means an animal will always learn quicker from another animal that uses, deals with, or has otherwise adapted to the expression of common genes. Now you can move beyond this and consider twins raised separately and adoptive children. Still, I think you come to see similar themes. What we are is much more than the sum of our enzymes and protiens, or certainly money.</p>
<p>"Ok, here is what I don't get. Everyone wants to say a kid is like the parents because of genetics, right? Well isn't this notion a little ignorant? "</p>
<p>No one's saying upbringing is not a factor as well.</p>
<p>Who cares if it is or isn't? I don't care about genetics, and honestly it shouldn't matter to MIT admissions officers --- this isn't going to change MIT's admissions process.
Anyway, I think I know what muddles parents and students about the admissions process. Read this:
MIT says they want people who have the passion to do stuff. As said in Ben Jones's blog thread, MIT's average # of AP courses was 4 to 5. Most took only math and science AP courses. They took it because they were interested in math and science.
But, here is where the problem comes in: Suppose Person X follows his interest and takes only math and science AP courses. But what happens? Other students (Person X's classmates) end up taking other english and social studies and foreigh language APs. Those students vitually end up with higher GPA and thus a high rank. So now Person X is no where near the top, and what does Person X's parents do? They FREAK OUT to death. They feel that Person X is going to get rejected from MIT and elsewhere. Tension builds up and exaccerbates due to fights between Person X and his parents. This consequently puts much pressure on Person X, which causes mental breakdown. Person X screws up on his application and gets rejected.</p>
<p>Now we high schoolers do not want to be like Person X. What advise would you give to MIT prospective students so they would'nt be in a Person X situation?</p>
<p>Your assertion:
[quote]
Most took only math and science AP courses.
[/quote]
From Ben's blog entry:
[quote]
The most common AP's taken were in math and science (no surprise, it's MIT).
[/quote]
These two statements are not equivalent, hence your resulting hypothetical scenario does not hold. The follow-on assertions are, um.... shall we say somewhat overstated and unsupported?
[ul]
[<em>]taking only math/science APs will result in a lower GPA and class rank
[</em>]an applicant's parents "FREAK OUT to death" when they consider their child not being admitted to MIT ("and elsewhere")
[<em>]fights will then break out between said parents and said applicant
[</em>]applicant will have a mental breakdown
[<em>]applicant will screw up their application
[</em>]applicant will be rejected from MIT
[li]the sky will fall (oh wait, that wasn't in the post, my bad)[/li][/ul]
My goodness. You have some unusual ideas of what family life is like for applicants to MIT, and some unusual ideas about the power of AP classes. I would advise taking some calming breaths and rereading tokenadult's advice on the previous page. And finding a range of schools to apply to where you would be happy and productive. (And maybe having a dispassionate talk with your parents about college admissions.) MIT is a fine school, but it is by no means the only fine school and it should be one of a set of schools to which a student applies.</p>
<p>First, I want to reinforce Collegealum314's point about bullet proof records behind research. The only weakness in my application grade/score wise was a B in chemistry and a B in spanish (and one B in french as well), and just 700 on the verbal. But everything else science/math wise was 800/5/A (I tried to compensate on the B in AP Chem with a 5 on the AP exam), so when I'm making comments about how research is more important I am assuming you are able to do well in classes. If you are having trouble doing most basic integrals and what not, then research is not what you need to be focusing on, you should be learning how to integrate.</p>
<p>AshwinSundar: Depending on where you go to school, you might have to take those extra AP courses to stay on top. The problem is that if you don't take those AP classes, and have free time to do other stuff, unless you are very concentrated and focused, you are probably just wasting your time and not actually doing anything useful. </p>
<p>You shouldn't think of MIT as some place you HAVE to go. MIT isn't going to teach something nobody has ever heard of at the undergraduate level. You can get the same education and training at many other upper level technical schools. </p>
<p>It sounds like Person X needs to have a sit down talk with his/her parents. Most parents pressuring their kids very hard and creating tension in the household about elite colleges don't have the purest of motives, know very little to nothing about college admissions, and are fooling themselves.</p>
<p>lol, post #189, </p>
<p>srsly, like, w tf.</p>
<p>bengolub, all I am saying is let's not conclude IQ differences are due to environment/SES or that they are due to genetics just yet. RE the findings of Murray and Jensen they in fact concluded the why of the differences and to me that is more persuasive at the moment.</p>
<p>collegealum, you make reasonable points, that usually for the one who does research rest of apps is bulletproof. I was most probably referrring to geographic advantages, like some neighborhoods nowhere near a college lab and disadvantages in that some high schools have faculty more geared toward prepping kids for research and others not so good at encouraging. I mean the culture of the high school. There are schools in NJ who are all chanting Intel from grade 1 and schools where they don't know what it is all about.</p>
<p>AshwinS, you are the typical product of an Asian Indian home, especially if one parent happens to be from IIT. I know of one couple who are so so so disappointed their son , in 8th grade has not yet mastered differential equations and linear algebra. Study Elizabethan drama, the Tang dynasty and other such areas, life will work out. Education is not to make men into carpenters but to make carpenters into men. We were not born to satisfy MIT, MIT was created to satisfy some of us in some aspects.</p>
<p>
Right. I mean, the evidence is there that intelligence is at least somewhat heritable. But the evidence is that IQ (a measure of intelligence, rather than "intelligence" itself) is only moderately heritable at best, and that differences in socioeconomic status can overwhelm differences due to genetics. (This is not surprising, by the way -- something can be very highly heritable, but entirely modified by the environment. Some genetic diseases like phenylketonuria are highly heritable and penetrant, but if children with the mutations are picked out at birth and fed a phenylalanine-free diet, they will never develop the disease.)</p>
<p>Theoretically, we have the tools in genetics and genomics to start discovering intelligence-related genes through genome-wide association studies. In practice, I think it's going to be pretty difficult, because intelligence is obviously polygenic and because our yardstick to measure who has it and who doesn't is pretty crude.</p>
<p>Anyone who knows this guy knows that he isn't the sort to recant statements that upset people, so I'm willing to believe he was misquoted as he says he was. I wonder what he did say, though.</p>
<p>Ok, fine, maybe I got a little hyper. But ramaswami, you are right about indians. What I said is actually what happens in typical asian homes (and possibly) other non-asian homes. I am not reeeeaaaally exaggerating. ramaswami knows what Im talking about.</p>
<p>The thing is I understand what MIT wants. The problem is the parents: They don't understand. Asian parents (and again, possibly) other parents think a student's smartness is based on grades and test scores.</p>
<p>hmmm, very interesting.</p>
<p>Note to self: Do not attempt to analyze or solve any problems related to African-American heritage. No one likes it.</p>
<p>Eluhan, thanks for the tip but I am like Watson in my work environment, not talking about IQ and genes but generally challenging accepted dogmas. Soon, there will be the first burning at the stake in CT, I will invite you all to watch me giving up the ghost.</p>
<p>Ashwin, thanks, yes I know the Asian parent business, doctor, engineer, finance MBA research scientist son, you may detour through film, jazz etc only brief detour so we can brag about that too in the matrimonial sweepstakes where we will describe our child as Renaissance man.</p>
<p>First-generation immigrant parents often imagine that college admission in the United States is like college admission where they come from. That's what is great about College Confidential: international participation, with lots of opportunity to talk about how different national systems of higher education differ in admission procedures.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Anyone who knows this guy knows that he isn't the sort to recant statements that upset people, so I'm willing to believe he was misquoted as he says he was. I wonder what he did say, though.
[/quote]
I read somewhere else that the newspaper taped the interview and stands by the quotes. If that's true, then there is an accurate record.</p>
<p>I am disappointed that CSHL relieved him of his position. As you mention, it's not terribly surprising to anybody that he's mouthing off and offending people, and if they didn't want to hire his mouth, they should have known better in the first place. Acting offended after the fact is abdicating some of the responsibility they should have taken before hiring him.</p>