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Comment by maaaats | Hacker News Reader

US university admission is so weird, I think. Where I'm from, the only thing that counts is your grades. No subjective letter, having to know important people for letter of recommendation, no need to force yourself to play an instrument, do charity work, play a sport etc. without actually wanting to do it.

What are the pro's of doing it this way?

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This system was created to exclude Jews who were getting high test scores. The bigoted notion was that Jews could grind the books, but could not compete as well-rounded gentlemen. By making the process more subjective, elite universities could exclude Jews while denying that the process was anti-Semitic.

Do elite universities still feel threatened by hard-working up-and-coming minorities who might endanger their relaxed white-shoe, gentleman's-A lifestyle? (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/03/the-trut...) I'll leave that to you to figure out.

That's part of it, another is a desire to have 'wealthy' donors not just hard working students. And finally, while highly motivated students get better grades they are not actually smarter which is why high school valedictorian is poorly correlated with success in life. Where many motivated students get discouraged, a few smart student can get motivated when finally presented with a real challenge.

Ivy schools are selling a brand and they want to be able to point to politicians and CEO's not just well respected doctors etc. In the end Ivy's don't really provide anywhere close to the education required to justify their costs but they do provide some great branding.

>>>In the end Ivy's don't really provide anywhere close to the education required to justify their costs but they do provide some great branding.

You attend an Ivy for the prestige, the social signaling an Ivy degree provides, the unique job opportunities offered, and most importantly the networking.

The real learning at an Ivy is done outside the classroom... being exposed to people and social classes you wouldn't have otherwise, learning the social cues of the 1%, how life "really works", etc.

For the real elites, this process actually starts much earlier than Hahhhhvahhd. You should see what life is like at the old blue blood independent K-12s...

I studied at Harvard some years ago and I wholeheartedly support the holistic admissions process. Good grades are a great predictor of your ability to get good grades, not much more than that.

As a nerdy Asian, if 50% of my classmates were nerdy Asians, my experience would have been much less fulfilling. Much of the education at college comes from the friends you meet along the way so a diverse, multifaceted class is an invaluable part of the experience. I have a friend who was an armed guerrilla against Iran and another friend who was forced into exile in Egypt after a coup in Sudan. These are the perspectives that expand a young 18-year-old's worldview. Both of them had a SAT score much lower than mine, but I would argue they deserved their spots at Harvard more than I did.

Why do you presume Asians are any more nerdy than others? It's one thing to be in favor of diversity of experience (it's great that you met such interesting people) and quite another thing to assume that Asian ethnicities are less likely to contribute such experiences to the university.

That second thing is called racism. (not saying you are racist, but your argument certainly justifies racism)

I wouldn't say I'm presuming Asians are nerdier. Since I'm a nerdy Asian, I can only speak to the type of people I know. What I meant is: "if I were in school with only people who were like myself."

So then, perhaps you'd want to replace

"As a nerdy Asian, if 50% of my classmates were nerdy Asians,"

with

"As a nerd, if 50% of my classmates were nerds,"

I'm one of those 'diverse' classmates I guess. Poor Iowa farm kid, got middling good grades (best in my class but that's not saying much). Couldn't afford anything without a full loan etc. But Stanford let me in, for no good reason. That was in 1981.

There's a lot of grade inflation, especially at the top level. I took 9 APs in high school, and they were, generally speaking, the easiest classes. Part of that is that, when you create a nationally-standardized curriculum, you have to water some of the content down. Part of that is a culture of not doing anything to jeopardize the student's admission prospects. The school's reputation is dependent on AP placement rate so they also had an incentive to keep kids in APs, and giving a B to a high-achieving student could provoke an angry response from the student or the parents.

Not to mention, there is no standardized grading system in the US. GPAs are nominally out of 4.0, but some schools pump those numbers by tacking .5 onto honors classes and 1.0 onto AP. At other schools its 1.0 and 2.0. Other schools don't have APs at all, or don't offer a bump for high-level courses. Who is the "better student?" The one who has a 4.43 at a school where there are no APs and honors is a .5 bump, or the student with a 5.28 at a school that offers 19 APs and gives a 2.0 bump? It's ludicrous.

The subjective measures colleges use actually started as a veil to enable racism in the 1920s. It gave them cover to deny anyone they wanted on the basis of intangible factors. This ended up hurting Jews the most. It has stuck around because it benefits the rich. Families with money to throw around can make their student look more desirable. Family connections can get you a prestigious internship with a senator. A few thousand dollars can get the student a spot on a "research trip" to Costa Rica. Another few thousand and you can get a book of your photography listed on Amazon. I go to what many would consider an "elite" school and all these examples come from people I know.

College admissions in the US is incredibly strange and arduous, and I'm dreading the day they my kids have to endure it. I would almost prefer they became plumbers or something...

>Not to mention, there is no standardized grading system in the US. GPAs are nominally out of 4.0, but some schools pump those numbers by tacking .5 onto honors classes and 1.0 onto AP. At other schools its 1.0 and 2.0. Other schools don't have APs at all, or don't offer a bump for high-level courses. Who is the "better student?" The one who has a 4.43 at a school where there are no APs and honors is a .5 bump, or the student with a 5.28 at a school that offers 19 APs and gives a 2.0 bump? It's ludicrous.

Or, of course, the student who has a 4.0 at a school that doesn't give bumps at all, but took no actual AP classes because that would ruin his/her GPA?

Systematic grade inflation across the country has made GPAs a poor indicator, and not all schools have the same grade systems.

Some schools even allow students to take AP/college level classes for bonus grade points. It's not fair to compare students getting a 4.5 (out of 4) grade points with a student from another school who can only get 3.8 for taking the same AP class with the same results.

Diversity. Not in the racial sense, but in the "variety of people" sense. If you only use one admission factor, than all your students will be good at that factor. You get a school full of good test takers, to the exclusion of good musicians, or athletes, or whatever other skills are valued.

Ok, but I got into Stanford based on test-taking. Got 99% in math and English parts of the GRE. Stanford had a thing for that, back then.

My grades were not great because of ADD - didn't concentrate in HS or even my first 4 years very much, homework was spotty or absent, but boy could I take a test!

The supply of applicants has grown much faster than the number of top tier college places. Part is due to that the fraction of Americans applying to four year colleges has doubled from a quarter to a half in the past 40 years. And the number of international applicants has grown even faster than that. Add to to this the relative ease of applying to multiple colleges by computer in the 21st century. Plus the insecurity and trophy-hunting that makes people apply to 10,20 or more. I was personally lucky to get into my top two choices with Early Decision in December and never applied to a third one.

What are the top universities in the world? That's the pros.

Unlike universities in most (all?) of the rest of the world, academic studies & grades are intentionally not the only mission within US schools. Extracurriculars, social clubs & sports are hugely important, to the point that selecting for "well rounded" success is something colleges try to do.

As others have stated, if it was based purely on grades it would be almost random. Grades are too easy to fake or inflate, and many high school students just coast through with straight As, whether they actually have a special aptitude for academics or not.

Grades don't tell the entire picture as well. I've seen enough people with perfect grades working far less than perfect.

Yes I remember in the UK the older bother of a class mate got 3A's at A level (back when that was hard to do) and was by all accounts the cleverest student the school had.

Unfortuntly when he went to Uni he had a nervous break down.

Grades rapidly become useless when all teachers have incentive to inflate them. The fear of random exclusion by an admissions committee (which is alleviated by the ability to apply to many schools) is replaced by the fear of random exclusion by a teacher who thinks that "teaching his kids a lesson," "giving them feedback," or "maintaining standards" is more important to their future than the grades he will give them (which is unavoidable and irreversible once encountered). Inevitably, too strong an emphasis on grades encourages kids to take only classes they know they can get As in, effectively forbidding them from pushing themselves, experimenting, or learning from the aforementioned group of "strict" teachers who definitely have something positive to offer even if they're in denial about the relative importance of grades vs what they have to teach. Simple workarounds like fixing the frequency distribution of grades aren't effective because the distribution of aptitude is far from uniform. Some classes of kids deserve to all get As; some classes deserve to all fail. If your system doesn't acknowledge this you incentivize people to shuffle their kids to avoid competition, negatively impacting the ability of smart kids to form groups, learn from other smart kids, and learn from the best teachers.

Standardized tests are much more evenhanded but not bias-free. Just as surely as an all-grades system forces grades upwards, an all-tests system forces uniformity on curricula. At the levels we are talking about, this almost certainly degrades their quality. If students pay for tests and the tests are administered by a company, tests incentivize a structure whereby students can pay for repeated chances at a test. Also, kids who have more time for preparation and money for tutors are put at an advantage.

Extracurriculars create another game with perverse incentives but they are almost certainly good for a child's physical and social development so ignoring them would arguably be worse as the opportunity cost would make participation inadvisable for "top" students. Meanwhile, extracurriculars certainly have something to offer the admissions process: contests with broad scope can serve as an alternative to standardized tests as a globally comparable measure. They also measure the much-ballyhooed "leadership skills" (which aren't nearly as easy to game as one might think; the truth comes out in the essays). When I was going through the process I wasn't convinced that leadership skills were important and this requirement chafed a bit. Now I suspect they are even more important than the admissions process gives them credit for and I can actually credit the whole process with doing me a bit of good.

The broad admissions system is far, far from perfect but the narrower alternatives certainly have plenty of their own problems.

How hard it is to cheat or bribe to get these good grades?

How hard is to cheat or bribe to get the other requirements, too (recommendation letter, charity, etc.)?

I come from a country where grades are the main variable, so I'd like to have a view on how these additional requirements make the whole process more robust. Is it just for a quantitative reason (cheating on N > 1 requirements is more difficult than cheating on 1) or are they necessary to correctly identify good candidates?

I'm guessing it's because they feel that grades are a poor indicator as to how well you will do at University, so they're fishing around for better things to go by.

I haven't looked at recent studies, but actually (normalized) grades and standard test scores are a pretty good indication of academic performance in university. If that was your only metric, you'd probably lean pretty heavily on those indicators. However, elite schools are--for better or worse--aiming for a mix of student backgrounds, interests, and experiences on the theory that this creates a richer learning environment than one that's solely optimized for conventional academic prowess.

It's probably also true to say that the Ivies and other top-flight, especially Eastern, liberal arts schools were historically more concerned with admitting "the right sort of people" than the most studious. So there never really was a history of an exclusively examination-based approach--though one can find Harvard admissions tests from the 1800s--e.g. http://www.businessinsider.com/harvard-entry-exam-2011-7

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