Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Do you list DYS on a college application?

I have to strongly disagree about this. I genuinely do not think that admissions staff at top colleges are going to be put off in some way by the DYS label. A high IQ is NOT a factor that will be held against a student in admissions. I can't image that it would be a "danger" for them to look it up. Of course, that alone will not get a student into college (my D will also very likely be a National Merit Scholar, for example, and has good grades and tons of extra curricular accomplishments). But I honestly would not dream of leaving it off. D's high school counselor completely agrees with this, by the way (and she used to be an admissions counselor at a top 20 LAC).

JonLaw,

Perhaps LawWorld is the most extreme example, but I don't think it's only LawWorld. For example, MIT faculty is full of MIT, CalTech, and Stanford grads, with sprinklings from other Ivies and Carnegie Mellon grads.

As stated, it's not the high IQ that would possibly be held against a student, but rather presenting high IQ as a reason for admission. I'm basing my opinion on horse sense. If I had two applications in front of me and one emphasized membership in a high IQ society and the other stressed more what a student had actually done and could actually do, I'd go for the latter every time. Pointing to membership in a high IQ society smacks of weakness and a sense of entitlement.

Wow... all I can say is that you must have a pretty poor opinion of Davidson, and their mission and accomplishments for gifted kids. My kid would say that her weeks spent at Davidson THINK was the high point of her high school experience so far, and in fact will say in one of her essays that her fondest hope is to find a similar intensive environment for college. DYS is sort of an aside to that, but no way would she consider leaving it off. She is proud of her DYS status and considers her THINK (and her CTY Cogito experience, where she was a forum moderator) to be critical experiences in her life.

And no one is saying that kids ought to leave off information on what they have done in addition to that. Most of these kids are very accomplished, and this will be just one item in a list of honors, awards, positions held, and other accomplishments. This is our second trip through the college application process, and there is room for as many activities, accomplishments, etc. as you want to list. Honestly, by the time they are seniors, most DYS kids will have enough material for a very robust and excellent application without the DYS reference. But there is NOTHING wrong with listing it.

Wow! I simply don't see it being that big a deal one way or the other. However, it would not be my decision to make. It will be up to DS whether he chooses to include the DYS designation on his college applications.

I would suspect that his decision many years down the road (he is only a 4th grader) would depend on how much involvement he has with the Davidson Institute over the next eight years. If he participates (as we anticipate) in THINK and/or its younger cousin, then it would make sense to mention it on the application. It would not be a brag or necessarily under the "Honors" section but as an organization with which he was involved. I admit that my college application experience is severely limited as I only applied to the Ivies (really too stupid to realize that I should have had a back up school) and those applications (as far as I remember and if they haven't changed) do solicit a sense of the type of organizations with which you are involved.

I don't believe you need an elite school. It's just a nice experience to have. There are also some elite employers who almost never hire anyone at a professional level unless they graduated from top tier schools or once hired, tend to treat those employees lacking the proper pedigree like second class citizens.

I disagree. If I had two applications with all else being equal or nearly so, I'd go for the high IQ. Every time. If I had an application with DYS or 999 or Prometheus written on it, I'd give it and the applicant extra attention.

Yes, being able to get stuff done is hugely important. But so is IQ, and the two are not mutually exclusive. IMO, our society pretty much dismisses the importance of high IQ. IQ is real and has important real-world ramifications.

It's interesting to read your weakness/entitlement opinion. How is stating a fact about yourself elitist? And don't grade schools make that same assumption when we nervously say, "Err...my daughter learns very fast; can you accommodate this?" And don't we all complain about how wrong that attitude is? Is it elitist to say that a ten-year-old kid is very tall or is a naturally very fast runner? Fast or tall kids were just born that way, the same as smart kids.

Say an up-and-coming ice skater was applying to a prestigious skating school for super-talented athletes. Would you hold it against her to note her membership in a club that only admits people who, in a month or two, can improve their skills by an amount normally expected in a year? Is she being an elitist? Or did she just write a reasonable notation showing objective evidence for her claim of being a super-talented skater who is capable of keeping the pace at the school? If noting her membership is reasonable, how could being a DYS be any different when applying to a university that's supposedly composed of very smart people who have to be able to keep a rigorous pace? If it isn't reasonable, should she also keep the skating club membership off her Cornell application? Isn't it enough to say that she can do a triple axel? Somehow, I can't see this happening...which means that when you're applying to a place designed for smart people, you can brag about yourself in 20-point boldface red type, provided you don't actually mention that you're, ahem, kind of a little bit smart.

And finally, why is it okay to say here that a very high IQ means that our kids have different learning needs than most, but it's not okay to say this idea applies to colleges as well, when places like MIT or CalTech may be environments where our kids will thrive because of their IQs?

That's completely illogical, and doesn't follow from anything I've written. Don't take it so personally; we simply disagree about how something could be perceived on an application. I'm not the only one who feels this way. From that perspective, since I really don't think that showing DYS status (again, if an admissions officer even realizes what DYS is) will ever tip the balance in favor of an applicant, I wouldn't risk running into an admissions committee member who feels as I do.

(Actually, now that I think about it, someone could mistake the word "Scholar" in the title to mean that a DYS admittee actually has some sort of proven scholarly ability, i.e. that it is an academic honor like being a Rhodes Scholar. I still would err on the side of caution-- too many people might actually go look it up.)

Not me, for the reasons stated. One can rest on one's laurels based on taking a test or two to demonstrate intelligence, or one can show actual fitness for the sorts of endeavors that take place at a university. The proof is in the pudding, and I'd give priority to applicants who appear to realize that. Go-getters go get. Between SATs and other tests there must be plenty of information already on test-taking ability.

I didn't say it was elitist; I said it showed a sense of entitlement (to entry at a place of higher learning). I don't consider people with high test scores to be the academically elite-- it takes more. If one is actually academically elite, high IQ test scores don't matter. Many brilliant people must have scores that don't accurately reflect their real-world abilities, and many others don't have scores at all.

Advocating for a child's educational needs and competing for university entry aren't at all the same. One demonstrates fitness for top college spots by actual ability and worthiness, not potential ability and educational need. In addition the sorts of things one chooses to put on one's academic resume give context about one's own personal values, a negligible factor when advocating for a young child's access to services.

I would hold it against her if she tried to gain entry to a program for accomplished young adult skaters by showing raw potential instead of developed potential, absolutely. Every time. By the time people are ready for college, I would expect them to demonstrate the sort of work ethic that leads to actual success, and they would naturally then be able to show fruits of their labor which would also show their ability. Trying to gain entry essentially by virtue of one's genes would show the wrong set of values, and potentially point to a weak applicant with something to hide. Aside from the active discounting based on these ideas, though, I could never give an applicant an edge because of DYS entry because a similar applicant might simply never have been in a position to apply to DYS.

The thing that's apparently missing from your viewpoint is the realization that by college age, one doesn't have to rely on best-guess testing from young ages to predict performance; one can show a record of actual performance (together perhaps with the sorts of standardized tests like the SAT that are well-accepted for college entry). That's far better for predicting success than membership in a high IQ society often achieved at the age of five, especially with such wide possible variance in testing conditions and even in controlled testing of a single subject from year to year. At young ages we must do the best with what we have available, and we comply with testing requirements to get into programs we think would work well for our children. We don't IQ test children for college entry, because it's an inappropriate and unreliable tool. When it comes to testing, the SAT test for example is more achievement-focused (though apparently somewhat g-loaded), and allows a direct comparison to performance of other applicants. If an applicant already had SAT scores or the like, IQ-test scores would add nothing useful-- they would seem in the nature of padding at best.

Membership in DYS just doesn't show college fitness. It only shows that a person achieved a certain set of scores on certain tests years before, and possibly needed to put together a portfolio because the test scores weren't completely there, possibly at age five, where a portfolio could consist of speaking about knowledge memorized from popular cable TV science shows and the like. Enhanced fitness for advanced studies at college age? Hardly. And SAT tests already provide enough achievement-test differentiation, of a type seemingly better suited to predicting college aptitude, so that more isn't necessary of a less reliable type-- even if the vast majority of applicants did go off to college with early IQ scores in hand.

My recommendation for anyone who's considering listing DYS status: instead put one's IQ and/or achievement test scores right on the application, and the age at which they were obtained. It's exactly as valid a demonstration of academic fitness for college, and more straightforward.

Correlation, not causation. The thing I was saying doesn't happen IME is filtering applicants out based on what university they attended. Do most successful applicants to good universities in practice come from good universities? Of course.

[I should say, of course, that I have no specific experience of recruitment practice at MIT; I can't rule out that it's different there, but it would astonish me.]

No, in law, it really is causation.

It's extremely credential-driven because that's how law works.

Plus, no one really reads or cares about any of the scholarship from the academy.

It's truly a strange world.

I'm pretty sure that I got into both college (SAT scores) and law school (LSAT scores) because of my innate intelligence. It had virtually nothing to do with my work ethic (by law school, I had no work ethic left at all).

I also got my first job purely through the credential from a T14 school. I simply presented my ticket and a summer clerkship was created specifically for me because of the name of the school I attended. They were literally starving for a T14 student.

I also wanted to point out that in a *law firm* as opposed to a law school, your value depends on your ability to being in business and be productive. Primarily it's a sales position at the partner level. Your value depends on the amount of money you bring in the door every year.