MIT shortens application essays

http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2009/10/04/no_essay_nightmares_for_mit_applicants/

by nobody_nowhere • 17 years ago

16 22 17 years ago

unalone• 17 years ago

I liked that MIT removed the extracurricular pressure. This I don't like so much. As a recent applicant, I hold that the two useful parts of my application were the portfolio and the essay. They're the best way to gauge somebody's genuine ability without them being able to lie much about it.

apowell• 17 years ago

Perhaps the essay is no longer the genuine gauge of ability that it once was.

"The hand-wringing that went along with the long essay, which has become the icon of the college application, has spawned a cottage industry of consultants, companies that edit students’ essays, and overnight camps where students can seek help."

RiderOfGiraffes• 17 years ago

I am reminded of this oldie but goodie ...

http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/essay.htm

nobody_nowhere• 17 years ago

Ah! Had always wondered about the origin of that. Unfortunately it would now need to be chopped in half :)

daniel-cussen2• 17 years ago

This probably helps kids with ADD.

anigbrowl• 17 years ago

I don't really think so. 500 words is not a long essay, and if you have sufficient qualities to seriously consider applying to MIT, you are likely able to hyperfocus and employ it as a strategy for meeting deadlines. With ADD it's hard to get and stay engaged, but when one does find something to engage one's attention, one can churn out a higher-than-normal amount of work in 'burst mode'.

daniel-cussen2• 17 years ago

I'm speaking from personal experience. I had ADD and didn't know about it when I applied to schools.

patio11• 17 years ago

This rationalization of essays is long in coming, because in truth the mythical status they're given is because they give students (and parents, and people selling services to parents) the impression that even in late junior year something can be done to significantly increase their chances of admission into the university of their choice.

This is, largely, bunk: essays are weighted extremely modestly relative to grades, test scores, and race. For example, on the University of Michigan point system, where 100 points were needed for an admit, the difference between a 3.2 and 3.6 average was worth 8 points, the difference between a 21 and a 22 on the SAT was worth 4 points, the difference between black and white was worth 20 points, and the difference between the best essay they read every year and the worst was worth... 1 point.

http://www.umich.edu/~mrev/archives/1999/summer/chart.htm

University of Michigan is distinguished from more selective universities more in that they had the misfortune to standardize and actually write down their admissions criteria rather than in having vastly different mixes than, e.g., MIT.

brandnewlow3• 17 years ago

Essays were originally instituted to give admissions staffs an excuse to keep out Jews and other minorities.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/10/10/051010crat_atlar...

"The difficult part was coming up with a way of keeping Jews out, because as a group they were academically superior to everyone else. Lowell’s [Harvard prez, mid-20s] first idea - a quota limiting Jews to fifteen per cent of the student body - was roundly criticized. Lowell tried restricting the number of scholarships given to Jewish students, and made an effort to bring in students from public schools in the West, where there were fewer Jews. Neither strategy worked. Finally, Lowell-and his counterparts at Yale and Princeton-realized that if a definition of merit based on academic prowess was leading to the wrong kind of student, the solution was to change the definition of merit....

...The admissions office at Harvard became much more interested in the details of an applicant’s personal life. Lowell told his admissions officers to elicit information about the "character" of candidates from "persons who know the applicants well," and so the letter of reference became mandatory. Harvard started asking applicants to provide a photograph. Candidates had to write personal essays, demonstrating their aptitude for leadership, and list their extracurricular activities. "Starting in the fall of 1922," Karabel writes, "applicants were required to answer questions on ‘Race and Color,’ ‘Religious Preference,’ ‘Maiden Name of Mother,’ ‘Birthplace of Father,’ and ‘What change, if any, has been made since birth in your own name or that of your father? (Explain fully).’ "

As a Princeton admission officer for 2 years, I read probably 5,000 essays. A few were memorable. Most were forgotten as soon as I finished scribbling out my summary. The point of the essay was to write something that would leave a mark on my brain so I might take an interest in your application later around the committee table during deliberations. Some kids were great at this, others not so much.

That said, I don't recall admitting a single student based on the strength of their essays. They were there to add flavor and color. If you didn't have "the credentials" you weren't going to write your way around it.

hughprime3• 17 years ago

Essays were originally instituted to give admissions staffs an excuse to keep out Jews and other minorities.

Whereas now they only use them to keep out whites and Asians?

brandnewlow3• 17 years ago

Now, as before, they're used to inject subjectivity into a process that could just as well be based on tests and grades alone.

The problem with the purely objective approach is you'd go from having a 40% minority campus to having about 2-3%. That's a political problem.

kwantam• 17 years ago

My application essay was not even remotely close to the 500 word number. The MIT application had an option where you could ignore their essay questions and just choose one of your own, so I basically made my Q/A a long-form joke. That was about 12 years ago.

A friend and classmate of mine at MIT went on to work for the admissions office for a few years, during part of which time we were roommates. The two things I learned from this were that the amount of work that went into reading the applications was astonishing, and that even an incredible essay submission couldn't save you if the admissions staff were convinced that you just weren't academically strong enough to make it through the school.

This leads me to believe that the changes weren't just to "remove the larger-than-life quality" of the essay. Rather, they were probably introduced to make it easier and faster for admissions staff to get the information they need about an applicant and simultaneously (as the article implies) to probe specific parts of the applicants' backgrounds.

It seems like a very logical change to me. I've always thought that the college interview was a far better way to go than the essay---when a person is given infinite time to prepare an answer they can mask a lot of deficiencies in areas that are extremely useful, e.g., thinking on your feet, dealing with other people, et cetera.

brandnewlow3• 17 years ago

Business idea: A service that lets you read, process, and manage applications digitally that doesn't suck.

dataman85• 17 years ago

A lot of schools use http://www.applyyourself.com/

Gibbon• 17 years ago

Business idea: A high quality education that doesn't rely on gatekeepers to arbitrarily deny it to you.

wooster• 17 years ago

As an aside, these are my favorite admissions essays: http://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/jon/family/jos/college/index....

Jos was a friend of some of my coworkers at Tellme (ex-WebTV folks).

Also, if you faint during workouts, EVER, you should read this: http://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/jon/family/jos/cardiac/index....

hughprime3• 17 years ago

The more I hear about the US university admissions process, the more I'm grateful for the Australian system, where students are admitted, or not, purely on the basis of their marks from their final year at school (half by a final set of exams and half based on school marks correctly normalized by those exams).

No BS essays, no BS extracurricular activities (unless, of course, you want to do them) and no potential for racial or other bias.

elblanco• 17 years ago

There's not a standard admissions process in the U.S. At my alma mater we just filled out some forms and directed the school to any prior educational transcripts we had. No essay, no interview.

It's actually considered bad form to inject any subjectivity into the process. Students are de-identified for most of the admissions process.

Admissions are based on a combination of grades/marks and standardized testing (SATs, GREs, GMATs, etc. and depending on what is being applied for).

The result? Strangely enough, one of the most diverse schools in the U.S.

http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/departments/college/?article=m...

gamble• 17 years ago

I'm not familiar with the Australian school system, but I bet there is a lot more national control over curriculum and teaching standards. The convoluted admissions process is the price Americans pay for having a decentralized educational system. If universities went on the basis of marks alone, I can't imagine how many schools would spring up where every senior mysteriously graduates with a perfect 4.0.

hughprime3• 17 years ago

You're right -- actually the curricula and the final exams are all done on a statewide rather than national level, but it is certainly more centralized than it is in the US.

babyshake• 17 years ago

Elite universities are increasingly interested in data about students that can't easily be doctored or cooked up by consultants, for obvious reasons.

So I'm curious why they don't just ask for a one minute Posterous video, like certain other elite institutions.

MIT shortens application essays

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