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Comment by Donald | Hacker News Reader

Harvard offers undergraduates remedial classes through their extension school. In fact, you may be surprised to hear that so many admits have issues with writing that they offer a non-extension remedial writing class (Expos10.)

These are just undergrads - students come from a variety of educational backgrounds and are admitted for various reasons, of which legacy is just one possibility.

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I think there are 2 things that make math different than writing in this case.

1. I expect the main reason for needing remedial writing would be English as a second language people. That is, smart people who got a good education, but that education wasn't primarily English. That doesn't really apply to math.

2. I expect standardized tests can more easily test math than writing due to the nature of solving math problems vs writing. Thus Harvard would be able to filter out people who are bad at math more easily than people who are bad at writing. Then again, maybe Harvard doesn't want to filter out people who are bad at math.

As someone who makes a living ghost writing and copywriting in the technology space, I assure you that many smart people with an excellent technical education struggle to construct coherent sentences when writing.

Math is one of many subjects. Many Harvard students head remedial classes in music, art, and literature too.

More info https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/4/3/expos-10-20-30-w...

That may be the highest days-since-account-creation to karma score I've ever seen. Have an upvote!

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