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I did my undergrad at a school with very relaxed admissions requirements and never got into any schools that use “holistic admission” like Harvard (or for that
by akhilcacharya 7y ago
I did my undergrad at a school with very relaxed admissions requirements and never got into any schools that use “holistic admission” like Harvard (or for that matter Duke, where I got rejected) does.
It’s clear to me that any attempt to make these admissions criteria is doomed to fail because *there is no good definition of “qualified”, and there can’t be. I’d wager if you dropped any 75th percentile student from NC State at MIT they’d probably perform well enough to graduate. Not 5.0, but with enough grit they’d do it.
I think more people should accept that all selective admissions is at some level social engineering. Making it more “equal” is a noble goal - but it’s still social engineering. These efforts would be better spent improving institutions that lead to actual class mobility rather than arguing whether 20% or 30% of Asian applicants to Harvard should get in for nebulous reasons.
- sokoloff 7y agoGetting into MIT is hard; graduating is not particularly difficult.
- akhilcacharya 7y agoIt’s like this at most elite institutions. NC State has a graduation rate of 75%. Duke (where I was rejected for being an inferior candidate) has one that’s 95%.
- mav3rick 7y agoThe percentage means nothing. It could be that some NC State's candidates may fail at both NCSU and Duke. And most Duke will pass at both universities.
- mav3rick 7y agoI've worked with both MIT and NC State grads and in all 3 cases MIT was far ahead. Now whether it was the CS program that was better or the raw smarts of the grads or both, I don't know.
- akhilcacharya 7y agoCan you expound on this? In what way were they "far ahead"? Under which circumstances? I went to NC State, for the record. Am I just "far behind"?
- mav3rick 7y agoSure, MIT grads knew many general CS and systems concepts more in depth than their NCSU counterparts. They would also finish their artifacts way faster than the NCSU grads. This is just anecdata and may or may not reflect the average grad quality from both these schools.
- akhilcacharya 7y agoWell, thanks for your candor in looking down on 99.7% of Americans. Usually people don’t say the quiet part loud.
- mav3rick 7y agoYou asked my experience and I told you with a disclaimer. You clearly aren't interested in it, rather than some platitudes like "everyone is the same". Again, I have no personal grudge against you or NCSU or other state schools. For that matter NCSU has a good systems program from what I hear.
- akhilcacharya 7y agoYour original reply was not really a material response to my point about social engineering at all - you just said folks at MIT are superior in a direct comparison. It's hard not to take away from that a direct attack on average folks like me, but I will say this - I'm not at all surprised.
- mav3rick 7y agoI qualified my response saying it's anecdata. Your responses clearly try to undermine the top engineering institutions, I provided a counter.