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There's also Goodhart's law / Campbell's law. Once the measures for admission are made public they'll cease being good measures as many will teach/live to the

There's also Goodhart's law / Campbell's law. Once the measures for admission are made public they'll cease being good measures as many will teach/live to the measures rather than actually remain high quality students. (Of course the measures may also be bad measures.) It may be better for the school to have a written system for evaluating or at least reaching an initial coarse filter result which they create and disseminate to external auditors who ensure it has been applied 'fairly' to the data set and which can provide opinions about the process without revealing details that could ruin the effectiveness of the measures. Additionally they could monitor the applicant pool to see if the applicants are more uniformly reacting to a discovered / leaked measure and thus that it has ceased being a good tool for decision making.

csa 8y ago
Being smart and being able to get shit done (that describes the top of most elite school classes) is not a mystery -- it's just really hard to do. The people who are able to do it, however, are pretty much all admitted. The measures for admission for the rest of the people (I call them very smart but unexceptional "clones") is based on things that benefit the university -- athletes, donors, etc. The "secret" for these folks is just to add value to the university. Some folks are born with it (cough Kushner cough), but others earn it by being leaders, athletes, etc. Check out Cal Newport's stuff on these matters. He's about as close as it gets to correct, imho.