Originally Posted by HowlerKarma
YES! Bostonian and I agree on this one.

Having very recently been through this process with DD, this is the "tell" for higher LOG kids. They have all those EC's because they don't NEED 20 hours a week on AP calculus; only five, freeing up the other 15 for theater productions or volunteer work, or practice at a musical instrument, or robotics, or whatever. It's a matter of pacing and rate of learning. HG students are flatly going to have more time to fill. It'd be lovely if tiger parents would quit whipping their own offspring to do it when they can't possibly... but I don't see that happening any time soon, either. So those children will go on not getting a childhood, or sufficient sleep, I suppose. Kids like those on the boards, of course, have no problem there (generally speaking, obviously not for kids with 2e concerns that impact speed).

No, I don't buy this argument at all. It's like saying that someone who can factorize quadratics in their head while juggling three eggs and riding a monocycle is more suited to Harvard Math than someone someone who can factorize quadratics sitting at a desk with pencil and paper. The problem is that the mathematical task itself has too low a ceiling, and the extraneous activities are a red herring. The solution is is to have much tougher academic tests that can truly distinguish the upper levels, and ignore the extraneous stuff.

Of course these institutions can have whatever admissions criteria they please. But no-one should pretend that the top 1% are all in an academic dead-heat and we have to use ECs as a tie-breaker.