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Comment by room500 | Hacker News Reader

That is a strong statement.

The ideal for college admissions should be to get a set of students that have the best possible chance to succeed. Unfortunately, a high school student doesn't have much experience with which to base that determination.

Extracurriculars are supposed to show that the student is well-rounded and driven - attributes that have been shown to be positively correlated with success in college and careers.

How would you want colleges to try to determine if a given student will be successful? Because straight academic scores are not the full picture of a person.

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> Extracurriculars are supposed to show that the student is well-rounded and driven - attributes that have been shown to be positively correlated with success in college and careers.

If extracurriculars are so important then why doesn't colleges require them to graduate? Why is their admission criteria so different from their graduation criteria? They ought to look similar.

If grades are enough to graduate they obviously don't value other things and therefore should just look at grades of incoming students. If however grades aren't enough to say that a person is a good individual then why do they choose to graduate unbalanced people who only got good grades but suck at extracurriculars? Don't they care about their output at all?

Ironic that you chose a story about Yale, but Yale Law/Medicine famously doesn't have grades. Grades are the easiest way to show that the student is participating, but it isn't the only way.

Yale Law doesn't have to use grades because it's the top law school and it can push 100% of its students. It's the same with top graduate departments, which have grades but rarely actually give anything below a B. Lower-ranked law schools have to use grades so the top students can actually distinguish themselves and get decent jobs.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/harvard-s-jewish-proble...

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