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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   29117 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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Harvard mostly boils down your smartness into their Academics rating as described here:

  1. Summa potential. Genuine scholar; near-perfect scores and grades (in most cases) combined with unusual creativity and possible evidence of original scholarship.

  2. Magna potential: Excellent student with superb grades and mid-to high-700 scores (33+ ACT).

  3. Cum laude potential: Very good student with excellent grades and mid-600 to low-700 scores (29 to 32 ACT).

Near-perfect test scores and grades will only ever get you the second-highest rating. I remember when I was looking at colleges 10 years ago that I noted that Brown only admitted ~25% of people with perfect ACT scores.

When you combine this with now-public data on Harvard's admissions, it becomes pretty clear that, with no change to the ACT/SAT, Harvard could pretty straightforwardly choose the next incoming class to have an average IQ of at least half a standard deviation higher than previous classes.

I think that's the rub: even if the ACT/SAT were redesigned to better discriminate among the top of the distribution, Harvard et al's current behavior makes me pretty skeptical that this would result in smarter people being admitted.

That being said, if you have amazing test scores and grades, you should probably really consider Caltech - they're have no legacy or affirmative action, and they place a huge emphasis on those exact factors.

This is neither here-nor-there, but there is good evidence that top schools under-weigh test scores if their goal is to predict who will be most successful. Who knows to what extent this is because (a) intelligence is super important at accomplishing things or (b) nearly all selective institutions [edit: including med school, law school, FAANG companies, consulting firms, etc] use intelligence filters since they're easy to evaluate - for instance, grit is hard to figure out in a test or interview.

Does cal tech still do this? I had heard that they had jumped on the social justice wagon and weren’t even excepting standardized testing scores for a while.

I’m actually having a hard time finding any concrete documentation from the last year. However, the Asian:Black ratio at Caltech is 10. At MIT it’s 4.4; at Harvard it’s 2.4; at Stanford it’s 3.5. So, at the very least it’s far lower in practice.

This is neither here-nor-there, but there is good evidence that top schools under-weigh test scores if their goal is to predict who will be most successful. Who knows to what extent this is because (a) intelligence is super important at accomplishing things or (b) nearly all selective institutions use intelligence filters since they're easy to evaluate - for instance, grit is hard to figure out in a test or interview.

I think this is it. They not only want smart students, but those who have potential to be leaders of industries, law, politics, etc. that will bring donations and repute. But interestingly, purely selecting for merit does optimize for donations though. MIT's endowment is also very big, about half that of Harvard, and bigger than Harvard on a per-student basis. High-IQ hedge fund managers and CEOs donate a lot.

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