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Joined: Feb 2010
Posts: 2,640 Likes: 2
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I did not notice at Harvard that legacy students were less intelligent than others, perhaps because the ones who were stayed out of physics classes. This is consistent with a finding from the article cited -- legacy students have higher average SAT scores than the rest of the student body. Mr. Hurwitz's research found that legacy students, on average, had slightly higher SAT scores than nonlegacies. But he was able to control for that factor, as well as athlete status, gender, race, and many less-quantifiable characteristics. He also controlled for differences in the selectivity of the colleges.
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Joined: Oct 2011
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I did not notice at Harvard that legacy students were less intelligent than others, perhaps because the ones who were stayed out of physics classes. This is consistent with a finding from the article cited -- legacy students have higher average SAT scores than the rest of the student body. Mr. Hurwitz's research found that legacy students, on average, had slightly higher SAT scores than nonlegacies. But he was able to control for that factor, as well as athlete status, gender, race, and many less-quantifiable characteristics. He also controlled for differences in the selectivity of the colleges. That's a straw man slain, then.
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Joined: Dec 1969
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Please keep this conversation respectful or I will be forced to delete more posts and/or lock the thread.
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Joined: Feb 2012
Posts: 1,390
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DH said when he went to Harvard as a freshman, he finally found his people. But the question is, would he or would he not have found his people at, say, Boston College? He can only answer from the perspective of a Harvard freshman, because that's his experience. I think others here could testify to other experiences. I can speak to this, because I attended multiple institutions as an undergraduate. I went to UC Berkeley freshman year (I got into MIT, but couldn't afford it on the aid package they offered that year), transferred to MIT as a sophomore, and took most of my humanities concentration classes at Harvard. MIT had my people; UCB and Harvard either did not have them or I couldn't find them. (I may have found them in engineering classes at Harvard, I suppose.) I was attached to a prestigious research group at UCB, and it was OK, but MIT was where I was really surrounded by my people.
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Joined: Feb 2011
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The Ivy League is broken and only standardized tests can fix it.... because that has done such a BANG-UP job of fixing k through 12, after all. Oh, wait. 
Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.
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Joined: Feb 2013
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The Ivy League is broken and only standardized tests can fix it.... because that has done such a BANG-UP job of fixing k through 12, after all. Oh, wait. Well that's a fairly obvious comeback, but seriously, the problem in with standardized tests in K-12, is how they are used, such as to measure the percentage of students in a school above a low floor. In the current paradigm these tests are seen as measuring schools, not individuals. If tests were used in K-12 to measure individual ability, and group students accordingly, then that would be a huge boost to K-12 education. Presumably Pinker is endorsing the use of academic tests (with high ceilings, so not SAT/ACT) to distinguish individuals at the highest levels.
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Joined: Sep 2007
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That piece suffered somewhat from thesaurus overload initially. But he made interesting points once he closed his Roget's: At the admissions end, it’s common knowledge that Harvard selects at most 10 percent (some say 5 percent) of its students on the basis of academic merit. At an orientation session for new faculty, we were told that Harvard “wants to train the future leaders of the world, not the future academics of the world,” and that “We want to read about our student in Newsweek 20 years hence” (prompting the woman next to me to mutter, “Like the Unabomer”). The rest are selected “holistically,” based also on participation in athletics, the arts, charity, activism, travel, and, we inferred (Not in front of the children!), race, donations, and legacy status (since anything can be hidden behind the holistic fig leaf). He added this observation, as well (for those who didn't read the piece, the writer is on the Harvard faculty): The anti-intellectualism of Ivy League undergraduate education is by no means indigenous to the student culture. It’s reinforced by the administration, which treats academics as just one option in the college activity list. Though students are flooded with hortatory messages from deans and counselors, “Don’t cut class” is not among them, and professors are commonly discouraged from getting in the way of the students’ fun. Deans have asked me not to schedule a midterm on a big party day, and to make it easy for students to sell their textbooks before the ink is dry on their final exams. A failing grade is like a death sentence: just the first step in a mandatory appeal process. He seemed to go back and forth with his opinions, and I was having trouble determining what he was trying to say in places (maybe he had the same problem). FWIW, I agree about changing the admissions process to make it transparent, but disagree with his SAT assertion. I will repeat that IMO, we need to reform the secondary school system and use exams like the Irish Leaving Certificate (or other similar national exams) for admissions. Everyone studies the same stuff in a given course, everyone takes the same test on the same day, and admissions are based on test scores. But this would never work in the US, because it can't be gamed, and we are a nation of people who bleat about such things as the rule of law and meritocracy while feverishly working to game the system to individual advantage.
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Joined: Mar 2013
Posts: 1,453
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This struck a chord with me:- "Just as troublingly, why are elite universities, of all institutions, perpetuating the destructive stereotype that smart people are one-dimensional dweebs? It would be an occasion for hilarity if anyone suggested that Harvard pick its graduate students, faculty, or president for their prowess in athletics or music, yet these people are certainly no shallower than our undergraduates. In any case, the stereotype is provably false. Camilla Benbow and David Lubinski have tracked a large sample of precocious teenagers identified solely by high performance on the SAT, and found that when they grew up, they not only excelled in academia, technology, medicine, and business, but won outsize recognition for their novels, plays, poems, paintings, sculptures, and productions in dance, music, and theater. A comparison to a Harvard freshman class would be like a match between the Harlem Globetrotters and the Washington Generals. "
Become what you are
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Joined: Feb 2010
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Steven Pinker is a Bostonian  . As for Deresiewicz’s pronouncement that “SAT is supposed to measure aptitude, but what it actually measures is parental income, which it tracks quite closely,” this is bad social science. SAT correlates with parental income (more relevantly, socioeconomic status or SES), but that doesn’t mean it measures it; the correlation could simply mean that smarter parents have smarter kids who get higher SAT scores, and that smarter parents have more intellectually demanding and thus higher-paying jobs. Fortunately, SAT doesn’t track SES all that closely (only about 0.25 on a scale from -1 to 1), and this opens the statistical door to see what it really does measure. The answer is: aptitude. Paul Sackett and his collaborators have shown that SAT scores predict future university grades, holding all else constant, whereas parental SES does not. Matt McGue has shown, moreover, that adolescents’ test scores track the SES only of their biological parents, not (for adopted kids) of their adoptive parents, suggesting that the tracking reflects shared genes, not economic privilege.
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