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On the other hand, maybe you don't want to help people submit better applications, because you can still only select a few of them. As the overall quality incr
by araneae 17y ago
On the other hand, maybe you don't want to help people submit better applications, because you can still only select a few of them. As the overall quality increases, it becomes more difficult to select between poor and high quality work. At least in the case of my intro bio students, essay 1 is always terrible and therefore easy to grade. I give them lots of tips, etc., for essay 2. The essays all improve, but I still have to assign the same mean grade so all their grades are the same. Basically it just makes my life harder.
- Xichekolas 17y agoI think you analogy with grading papers is flawed. Sure, it's easier to grade bad things than good things, because you don't have to look too deeply, but YC does not have to assign mean grades. They are reading in order to find useful information. If all applications become more concise and useful, that is a net gain, even if it makes the choice of who to interview less obvious.
- araneae 17y agoIt's not the analogy that's flawed at all. You admit that this might make that choice of who to interview less obvious, which is exactly my point. However, if the goal of teaching is to teach students, then obviously one should try to improve their writing! Similarly, as you point out, if the goal of YC is to find useful information, then of course they should provide this additional help. tl;dr: Of course, most intelligent people I know would have found everything in this link perfectly obvious. In this case, you'll fail to separate people with good projects and reading comprehension from people with good projects AND good business sense. It reminds me of applicants to our dorm (residents reviewed applications and rated them, which decided admission). It was easy to get into the dorm if you had any idea what the dorm was about. But some people just "didn't get it" and they were easy to pick out and rate poorly. (Bad application: I want to live here because I'm an architect and the architecture building) (Good application: I want to live here because I like getting naked in a kiddie pool in the middle of winter.)
- psawaya 17y agopg himself said in his essay that they end up passing on a lot of founders who seem qualified, but didn't make themselves clear enough. I bet having to choose between too many well written applications submitted by qualified people would be a great problem for yc to have. =)