One question - you write "The top colleges are skeptical of all the standardized tests and most of the high school curriculums." and then " I can't say much about it other than this: the kids you think would do well on the tests do incredibly well. The kids you think will do badly, do very, very badly."
Why does this make you skeptical of the tests? Do you think the tests are testing the students' socioeconomic background rather than ability/potential?
I would bet on the poor kid, because he's likely to have higher "g", to so speak. Are you arguing that the rich kid is the better bet, because his advantaged background will continue to pay off in a way that's underrated by the standardized tests and grades?
Also, your assumptions are pretty out there.
1. The odds of a poor kid getting the same quality of education as a rich kid are very, very low, especially if you knew just HOW good of an education rich kids in the U.S. can get. The most informative part of my two years in admissions was the week I spent visiting elite boarding schools in New England to meet with students thinking about applying.
My meals and conversations with the students there were astounding. Their teachers all had PhDs. There was not one ugly or overweight kid in any of the schools. The students were years ahead of where I'd been in math and science coming out of a public high school in the Midwest. And they aggressively questioned me about every aspect of Princeton's curriculum and admission process. When I would visit public high schools in the Midwest, the kids rarely, if ever had questions for me. They had no clue what to even ask me about. "Princeton" was just so completely foreign to them. Not so for these kids, who all had friends currently studying there. Many of them had siblings who'd graduated from there already.
So this was a real eye-opener. You can be the best kid in a crappy school, but the fact that you were in a crappy school is going to have an impact in the grand scheme of things. That's why we'd never compare kids across contexts. It just made no sense.
Similarly, the test scores, grades "et all" for the rich kid would probably all be higher.
If there was a "poor kid" who had incredible credentials AND didn't sound like a basket case, then he'd be hotly pursued by every top school in the country. But those kids are very rare, so it's not realistic to pit a student like that against a "rich kid with good grades and scores" which is as common as air in these applicant pools.
If I did have to pick, I'd take the more precocious kid every time. I'd pick the kid who's able to make stuff happen for him. There are poor kids that can do this. There are rich kids that can do this. It's much, much rarer to find a kid from a less privileged background with this mindset though.
What I found with the prep school kids there (I was from a mediocre public school) was that the great education they received in high school did not teach them to learn on their own. This was particularly true in the sciences (physics, in particular) but might not have been true at all for those following the pre-med/i-banker/mgmt consulting track.
Even though they might have seen some of the material in high school, the depth at which it is addressed in college called for a level of thinking that depended more on mental maturity then on familiarity with the material. I remember a classmate from France who showed me his linear algebra notes from high school and had obviously done matrix manipulations but just couldn't get the proofs in Mathey's 1st year linear algebra class. He ended up switching to industrial engineering, doing management consulting, MBA, etc., and is assuredly making more $ than I am.
But the real thing I noticed was that all these folks talked to their professors differently than I did. I was intimidated and afraid of them. I told myself that most of them were jerks, when in reality I was just really insecure about my ability to say something intelligent. My perception of authority was completely different than theirs.
I took a class with Robert George during my sophomore year, Constitutional Interpretation. It was considered one of the most challenging humanities courses in the school when I was there.
There was a 90 minute, fast-moving Socratic lecture once a week. George wanders the lecture hall, pointing at students and pulling them into arguments about the points of whatever cases you're discussing.
Then there was a 90 minute precept once a week. 20 students and either the professor or a preceptor (often a NYC lawyer friend of George's) would lead a conversation about the week's cases.
Basically, precept was a 90-minute, 20 person argument. And I just folded. I'd never been on a debate team. I'd been raised to think arguing and questioning other people in public was the height of rudeness. What happened in precept just did-not-compute. I'd read all the material. I'd make just as many notes as the other guy, but when it came time to "fight" about it, I just shut down. I was terrified.
Now, the other students were probably just as terrified as I was. But they'd also probably been in classes like this before. There was some precedent for talking about ideas in this sort of controlled, but boisterous way. What looked to me like a lot of fighting was really just a spirited debate. I was just completely psyched out by it.
That was a real wake-up call. I was able to see that there was a basic tool of "successful" people that I seemed to lack in the toolbox. I got a lot better at it eventually. But that's the sort of difference I observed.
What I didn't realize until well after graduation was how the non-academic side of the Princeton experience can shape one's career, e.g., the socialization that happens at "the Street" or the during spring breaks. These were just training grounds for later life. Personally, I found the academic side fascinating but didn't care much at all for the social scene there, but in retrospect, I probably wasn't sophisticated enough to appreciate it (and maybe still am not :) )
Being from a middle class background, after graduation I expected to go grad school, get some more education and get a job as an engineer. Somehow most of my classmates viewed engineering as a stepping stone to something else: mgmt consulting, business, etc. I wondered where I missed this info, and I think it was at the eating clubs (I had done Stevenson Hall). Not to say that I regret my choices -- they simply never appeared on my radar and so I didn't make a conscious choice.
It's very interesting that you bring this up. I noticed this, in the workplace, when I worked at a hedge fund. People who came from wealthy backgrounds had no fear of the boss and seemed, from the outset, to be half a level above same-rank co-workers. They had a refined knack for putting authority in its place, which doesn't mean being a jerk; on the contrary, it means doing what the boss wants while "training" the relationship as one among equals. They treated work as an extended education, and their relationship with their boss as mentor/protege. This is an attitude that's not restricted to the well-heeled, but somehow, those from privileged backgrounds were able to do it in a way that didn't piss anyone off. (In this case, you have to worry more about pissing off co-workers than the boss.)
I'm in a startup, so there isn't this concept of authority or hierarchy in my case.
What I'd say is that you need to be able to go to work without fear. Fearing the boss antagonizes him on a subconscious (if not conscious level). He doesn't want to be a boss, in most cases. Fearing co-workers can socially isolate you. Careful confidence is one thing, but fear is professionally crippling, and the vast majority of people from middle-class backgrounds have way too much of it for their career's sake.
So, to answer your question: I don't personally go to work with fear, but I'm not in a hierarchical environment. I don't know how I would handle one if I went back into one.
One other trait I've noticed of Ivy League graduates in the workplace is that they handle grunt work pretty gracefully. You might think the opposite; having come from prestigious schools, they might act as if they're "too good" to do menial tasks, but the opposite seems to be the case. They handle it gracefully because it doesn't damage their confidence. (Of course, if you give an elite college grad only grunt tasks for 6 months, he'll leave because he's not learning anything; but that's different from the ability to take on an unpleasant project without getting insecure about being assigned it.)
In this regard, how poor is poor? And, for my better understanding of your statement, what are some examples of "incredible credentials"? This whole discussion is quite interesting to me, as I applied to exactly one college in my day, in the 1970s, my state's flagship university, largely for financial reasons. I was not aware then of what I hear now, that more selective colleges will both admit and fund students from working class or poorer backgrounds.
Incredible credentials would be 2400 SAT, 780-800 on 3 or more SAT IIs and straight A's.
And yes, the top schools are flush with cash, though they took a beating this past year, and they are using it to bring in kids from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. It's one of the big trends in the Ivies over the last 10 years.
So if he's poor enough that the college can brag about admitting him, he gets in, but if he's run-of-the-mill economic 15th-percentile, he has no shot unless he manages to finagle his way into a high school offering the "right" extracurriculars (e.g. crew)?
Incredible credentials would be 2400 SAT, 780-800 on 3 or more SAT IIs and straight A's.
Out of curiosity, is the difference between 2300 and 2400, or even 2200 and 2400, really that significant? I know that it matters a lot in admissions, but I don't think it has much predictive value over academic performance at the upper levels. IQ tests become less predictive at the upper end, and I wouldn't be surprised if SATs were the same way.
What do you mean by "economic 15th-percentile" (mentioned in more than one of your replies) in this context? What income level?
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/in...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...
http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/sat/counselors-gu...
and is heavily recruited by Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, at least, being well within the scope of their financial aid initiatives.
On the other hand, encouraging people to apply with almost no chance of admitting them is not "recruiting"; it's playing a numbers game. I say "no chance of admitting" because it's nearly impossible to clear the extracurricular bar at the socioeconomic 15th percentile. At that level, the "right" extracurriculars are not offered, but you're not so poor that you can pull off an "overcoming challenges" essay (that was the admissions schtick du jour ca. 1998-2003) or that a college can brag about admitting you.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_27/b3840045_...
seems to have been part of changing the culture of university admission offices. A student from a family with an income at the fifteenth percentile of national household incomes is a rare student at the most selective colleges and IF the student has competitive grades and test scores and some economically reasonable extracurricular involvement, the student has a great chance of admission today and a very good chance of lavish financial aid. Colleges today do brag about admitting students at that income level.
See also
http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/12.06/99-admissions....
for more on the recruiting efforts.
Fewer than 300 members of class of 2008 worldwide scored 2400 on the new three-section SAT,
http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/sat_perce...
so that is a rarely encountered characteristic even in the applicant pools of Ivy League colleges. (Princeton's entering class of about 1,243 students is numerous enough to include all of those students, if they all apply to Princeton.)
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/41382...
And not all of the 2400-scorers on the SAT Reasoning Test have the specified scores on the SAT Subject Tests. So I guess I wonder if slightly less incredible credentials would still be noteworthy.
SAT fee waivers
http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/sat/calenfees/fe...
or their ACT equivalent
http://www.actstudent.org/faq/answers/feewaiver.html
appear to be the usual way that colleges identify low-income students. The specified income level
http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/sat/counselors-gu...
for SAT fee waivers is meant to match the eligibility levels for some federal programs, but might imply somewhat more prosperity than "food stamps, free school lunches, 3 pairs of pants." For sure, anyone eligible for the fee waivers would be shocked by the LIST price of any Ivy League college.
Right. Very wealthy kids become very good at impressing people early on in their lives.
If there was a "poor kid" who had incredible credentials AND didn't sound like a basket case, then he'd be hotly pursued by every top school in the country. But those kids are very rare, so it's not realistic to pit a student like that against a "rich kid with good grades and scores" which is as common as air in these applicant pools.
It depends on what you mean by "poor". If we're talking about someone from abject poverty, or from Wyoming in a year short on mountain-state applicants, you're correct. If you're talking about someone from upstate New York at the economic 15th-percentile, you're wrong. He would not be highly sought; he'd probably be turned away for not knowing which extracurriculars were "right" (e.g. crew, sailing, lacrosse) and which were not.
When I left my public school for a private, east coast boarding school, the lack of any fat kids was the thing that struck me the most the first day I arrived. The second thing that struck me was the utter lack of assholes and bullies.
One other bit of food for thought: I ended up going to private high school and then ivy league for college. But today I consider myself less educated than my dad, who paid his own way through a lesser tier college. The reason is my dad studied engineering and had useful skills by the time he graduated. Very few ivy league students learn anything useful in undergrad. The college is mainly a big social club. Kids from a disadvantaged background can derive advantage from mixing with this higher social class, but the its not the classroom education that's value add. For this reason, I think people should worry less about inequities in ivy league admission. The schools simply aren't value-add anyway, so attending has little bearing on your life outcome.
And by cool, I mean people who are doing interesting stuff, interestingly. That was the definition I went by. Others had their own. That's why committee is so much fun.
Instead of standing on the sidelines with a headset and clipboard and having the local paper write a human interest piece about how he's "helping the offence," he takes a job at a local marina taking care of the boats.
He's quickly put in charge of the place. While doing this, he learns he's fascinated by the boats, their lines and curves and decides he wanted to study architecture. (I fudged the details here but that's the story.)
Let's break this down:
1. Kid faces setback. 2. Kid responds in unexpected way. 3. Adults recognize his competence and give him considerable responsibilities. 4. Kid handles this well (his boss wrote a great letter of recommendation) 5. While working on his unusual project, kid discovers passion for something. 6. Kid wants to come to your school to engage with that passion.
That's kind of the textbook example. Admittedly, his social circumstances (middle class white kid with lots of connections via football) helped him make that decision between steps 1 and 2. I bet he had a parent who was like "son, you're done with football. Let's go on a new adventure." And that can make all the difference. But still, the kid executed.
We didn't admit the guy. That's why the job's tough. Because there's 1000 kids with stories as good as his or better.
But he certainly got more attention than the average kid.
Sometimes tests show you how naturally bright students are (I didn't prepare for the SATs and got a 2190, including one "perfect" score category). More often they indicate who spent the most time preparing - learning how to "cheat" the system, in other words. Some students take years of SAT prep, and that completely ruins the idea of it being an aptitude test.
Post-test, there were quite a few complaints from the super students (some of them confident in scoring in the 1450-1500 range), as it was a curve ball because as suburban-bred kids how could we be expected to know what winnowing meant and more importantly, the correct multiple-choice answer.
Winnowing: the act of separating grain from chaf
That's what I hate: this idea of a "perfect" test, or a test that has an "acceptable" range.
Perhaps I'm drawn to the things I am - art, entrepreneurship - because they're harder to measure and can't as easily set standards. Or perhaps I'm drawn to those things because they're more meaningful than things that you can judge by assigning a number or plotting a chart of scores. In either case, it annoys me when people take numbers too seriously in that regard. The only numbers that really ought to matter are personal numbers: not your numbers compared to somebody else's.
Indeed. Expressing units of measurement in terms of feet or meters? Standardization makes them meaningless. Instead, I'll just wave my hands in the air and say "roughly this long." And (X)HTML standards? Don't get me started. Lets all just throw angled brackets to the browser, that's far more meaningful.
Incidentally, your actual complaint seems to be that some existing standardized tests are poorly designed. This is a problem of test design, not standardization.
http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2005Spring1aF...
http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2007Fall1aFin...
http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/classes/fall2008/2008Spring1aF...
I'd argue that if that's how math is being taught, there's a problem. "Teaching to the test" taught me to hate math in high school. In middle school, we were given a brilliant teacher who was allowed to teach however he wanted, and we left 8th grade understanding trigonometry better than most of the high schoolers we were with.
Have you read Paul Lockhart's "A Mathematician's Lament"? That highlights the problems fundamental with the current math curriculum. From the tests that you linked me to, with all due respect, it doesn't look like you're doing anything different: you're spitting out formulas to be memorized. That's not math: that's mechanics. I hate that students are taught like that.
Later courses are more focused on mathematical reasoning, and tests reflect this as well. For example:
http://www.math.rutgers.edu/grad/phd_requirements/written_qu...
These exams are also pretty tough to game (even though they are standardized); the easiest way to teach to the qual is to teach how to reason about real/complex analysis and algebra.
You don't seem to agree with the curriculum. Lockhart's article claims that courses like Calc are not well suited for elementary school math (and I agree). That's an orthogonal issue.
The calc tests do a decent job of measuring what they are trying to measure: how well students understand the mechanics and concepts of differentiation and integration.
The minute you standardize something and use it as a method of competition - be it GPA or SAT score or pretty much anything else where you accept people into something based on a number - you make that number meaningless. The presence of numbers means that people are suddenly able to hack the system, and that means that the numbers don't mean a thing at all. They are no longer indicative of good performance.
Do you think the difference between an 800 and a 1400 student is "meaningless"?
Maybe I have a 1400 without studying. Or maybe I spent an hour a day every day for three years so that I could get that 1400. I have a friend who got a 2390 on the SATs, 800s in something like 6 SAT2s, all because she studied for them nonstop. If she hadn't studied, she wouldn't have that same score.
The insidious part is that we're taught that the difference between a 2390 and a 2400 is more than the difference between a 2380 and a 2390. Either you're "perfect", or you're not. That doesn't mean perfect people rise to the top. It means that "perfect" students are the ones who waste their lives studying to look better on paper, when in reality they're just wasting their time on something meaningless.
I agree that too much can be read into tests, but to say they are meaningless is to overstate the case.
That said, I (and a few students in my college who were in the same situation as me) had a very, very low grade point average considering I wanted to apply to snooty upper class schools. (A 3.1 unweighted means you have a hard-as-hell time getting into any of the really elite places.) Beyond that, many colleges wanted SAT 2s, and I bluntly refused to take any more standardized tests senior year. I was sick and fed up with taking tests just to place into schools. I still think it's a terrible system that wastes students' time for the sake of assigning a number. And so I, and many other extremely bright and talented kids, ended up merely going to a good public school, hoping that it would be what we wanted out of college. As it turns out, a lot of us are dissatisfied. And it annoys me that a lot of kids that aren't as comparatively bright as that tiny group got into much more prestigious schools, because while we were doing our own things (one kid went to Colombia senior year to do work with their science labs, another was a multiintrumentalist in a variety of different-genre bands, so on and so forth), other kids were spending every minute of the day studying and looking for ways to peak out their GPA. The kids who were cramped and rebellious and spent their time going their own way as decisively as possible almost all wound up at public schools (the musician went to Rutgers, the scientist went to Penn State, I and a few artist/musicians went to TCNJ), and while the schools we're at aren't bad, they're certainly mediocre compared to what the best schools have to offer. We wound up there because we hated the useless, monotonous system and so our scores were lower and while I think if I could do it again, I'd make sure to do better in school - it would have been worth the tedium - I hate that that's the choice, either play to a really shitty system or get subpar results. So in my mind I imagine a system that focuses exclusively on finding those exceptions to the rules.
You might be more awesome than your grades indicate, but it's hard for them to know that. I agree that what you do outside of class should count, and count alot! But as far as I know, they already do take that into consideration. Admissions folks are just trying to do the best they can.
Sure, the system sucks, but it is set up to solve a fundamentally hard problem for which there exists no good solution. But I don't think the grass is that much greener on the other side. The public schools you mentioned are very good, and it won't hurt you to go there unless you are trying to become President of the United States. I think you'll turn out okay regardless. It sounds like you and your friends are very bright and capable (It scares me slightly how smart the younger folk are on Hacker News. I blame the internet) . I don't think a top 10 college makes that much of a difference versus a top 20 college for a bright and capable person.
Bucking the system doesn't really help. Nobody in a position of authority knows that you are doing it, and if they did they wouldn't care. It only hurts you. Also, the irrationality of the systems you are involved in will only get worse after school, so you might want to start practicing your patience for stupid systems with power over you. You oughta see the application I had to fill out to get my passport (I think I got randomly flagged by the DHS. I had to provide a photo-copy of my high-school yearbook! And I'm 25! How the hell am I supposed to find a copy of my high school yearbook?!!?! As it turns out: not easily).
That's exactly the problem! The system should be designed specifically for those exceptions - they're the people with the most to offer society.
The public schools you mentioned are very good, and it won't hurt you to go there unless you are trying to become President of the United States.
They aren't necessarily bad. They're just unpleasant. Public schools attract a sort of apathetic student that private schools don't, and despite the constantly-made comparisons, the lack of funding shows. I'm about 30 minutes away from Princeton, and every time I visit is a slap in the face.
Confused as to why you're against standardized testing. Acing the SAT is like a magic wand for smart kids with subpar GPAs.