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What if the admissions office can’t spot the smart ones?

Over the years, we’ve come to believe that the spring admissions machine is the ultimate sorter of humans. The kids enter the machine and leave in some bin labeled “good”, “great”, “okay”, or “meh”. The schools try really hard and it’s all so serious. We’ve got to believe in it or else all of our faith in the college industrial complex will be for naught.

The kids that leave in the Stanford bin are supposed to be the best and the brightest but maybe the admissions office is just letting in the slick ones with the BSing skills to put a great gloss on everything they do. Tamar Lewin at the NY Times has a longish piece about the new online courses that we keep hearing so much about. While it’s filled with the usual head scratching puffery– is a online video any more of a “personal tutor” than a book– it does include one fascinating tidbit.

160,000 enrolled in one course on Artificial Intelligence last year and 23,000 completed it. Only  248 got a grade of 100% and none– that’s right– none of them were actually enrolled at Stanford. The current students went head to head with the great unwashed from the Internet and they couldn’t come close.

This must be freaking out the folks at the university who worry about kids peaking behind that curtain. You would think that the awesome, wonderful admissions office would have managed to locate one kid who could keep up with the great unwashed. Why pay all that money if your kid is just going to be trounced by some smart kid who isn’t distracted by the coffee shop at Tresider?

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This entry was written by admin and posted on March 5, 2012 at 12:41 pm and filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

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2 Comments so far (Add 1 more)

  1. “This must be freaking out the folks at the university who worry about kids PEAKING behind that curtain.”

    Very, very interesting heterograph you used there. If intentional, I applaud. (applauds anyway)

    1. Higher Game on March 5th, 2012 at 1:13 pm

  2. Current admissions protocols at all levels of academia are a joke.

    “Harvard Business School? You’ll Go Through Her First” By MELISSA KORN
    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052970203833004577251490098811270.html

    “WSJ: How long do you spend on each application?

    “Ms. Leopold: Ten minutes minimum, and if you aggregate all the times I go back, probably 30 minutes or so. I sweep over, look at everything, and then go back.”

    Ha Ha

    The various instruments they use have been deliberately altered under political pressure to make sure that they do NOT provide accurate information about either achievement or capability. The political pressure comes from those people who claim that tests are unfair because they are culturally or sexually biased. Admissions personnel buttress those claims because the less admissions is based on objective factors, they greater their power is.

    What I do not understand is why we have not yet had a pay to play scandal in “Ivy League” admissions. I am not talking about contributing a dormitory to buy admission for your kid, I mean $40,000 in a Cayman Island bank account to the admissions officer. Even being a bag-man should be quite lucrative.

    We can also be fairly certain that there are a lot more really bright kids out there than are in seats in fancy private colleges. A 2 test SAT score of 1400, should spot a kid who is 2 standard deviations above the mean in ability. (It doesn’t see above) In percentages that is the top 2.3% of the population. Since there are about 4 million kids per year of age, there are about 92,000 who have 1400 level ability. That is far more than the number of seats in the top 50 private colleges in the country. Since the colleges do not try to recruit solely by ability, we can be fairly certain that there are more kids out there who can do this level work than there are inside the ivy covered halls.

    2. Walter Sobchak on March 5th, 2012 at 6:52 pm