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MIT Axes the 500-Word Application Essay
netbuzz writes "No longer will those applying to MIT have to write the storied 'long' essay — long as in 500 words. 'We wanted to remove that larger-than-life quality to that one essay and take away a bit of the high-stakes nature of that one piece,' says the dean of admissions. Not everyone agrees with the bow to brevity, including a current MIT student who penned a scathing critique in The Tech and offers up her own essay as an example of what the form can provide to both MIT and the applicant." [125 words, including these.]
It's ironic that in her essay Ms. Bayley states, "As fuzzy logic becomes more and more obsolete (in humans, at least), boolean values have come to rule all. Precision, accuracy, the Styrofoam cup holding your coffee, and the microprocessor in your toaster oven are all a product of infinitely many zeros and ones, a concept I find both irresistibly ridiculous and intriguing." An essay, used as a factor in deciding admissions, is quite 'fuzzy' when compared to grades and SAT scores.
As for the essay itself, meh. It's not all that bad, but the wit sounded a bit forced and also a little too self-aware. I also get the feeling that she read and was influenced by the infamous I have not yet gone to college essay.
"The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well."
It's not as if there are heaps of these students. At the edges of the bell curve where the Ivy Leagues recruit from, there are only a relative few people produced every year. It's not as if MIT, Harvard et al can magically produce geniuses through their great teaching ability, they just select the cream of the crop.
If MIT wanted to differentiate some more, another standardized test would do just as well. The questions on average would need to be very hard, but with varying degrees of difficulty to distinguish accurately whether someone is IQ 135, 140, 145, 150, 155, 160... etc. Since SAT is just a proxy IQ test anyway.
In fact, this is basically a Microsoft style recruiting tool - AFAIK they use a few very hard questions to issue an IQ test. Since they are only after the very best, if you fail they weren't after you anyway, whether you scored 85 or 125, they don't care.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Care to suggest how they differentiate between the thousands of applicants with both grades and standardized testing scores smashed up against the limits of the scales?
Yes. Make the tests more difficult
"You can't allow somebody to commit the crime before you detain them." [Condoleezza Rice]
An essay is a shitty way to select engineering students and doesn't gauge anything other than their ability to make up 500 words of bullshit.
Doesn't that depend on whether the person reading the application is capable of recognizing bullshit? Or are we assuming that any 500 word essay can only possibly be bullshit?
My father told me that as a graduating high-school student (Canadian) back in the 50's, a voluntary test was provided to all students to test your science and mathematics prowess. The intention was to draw attention to your knowledge in order to get a scholarship or admittance into a Canadian or US ivy-league school.
Questions on the test included "How would you land on Earth's Moon?" The answer they were looking for was totally open since it was intended to test your real knowledge of math and science.
One could probably just answer .... build a rocket, once it leaves Earth, position it to fly to the moon and wait a few days for it to get there. But, you won't attract much attention.
My dad recalled that one year - and he knew the student quite well - had probably gone as far as to detail the amount of fuel (and type of) to be used, some basic designs of the shuttle, accounting for the Van Allen Radiation belts, etc etc - all with the calculus equations/work to go with. I believe the kids' dad was an engineer but it went above and beyond what other HS students would know and showed the depths of his knowledge + his grades.
This was without calculators. And without computers/Internet back then, he would probably have spent some serious time reading books on the side - in the sciences/math naturally, to have explained his answers in as much detail.
I don't know all the details but he apparently had one of the best scores on the tests and had been accepted at Harvard or MIT.
At the least, it beats explaining how a 477 word essay in part discussing your eye color, provided enough information about your academic abilities to be admitted to an engineering program at MIT.
Good point. Maybe they should have changed the requirement to an object of up to 1 kilogram.
Also, 500 words is not a long essay. And standardized tests and grades are a poor judge of talent.
As compared to a 500 word essay that you probably wrote with outside assistance? The problem with subjective examinations is that they depend on the mindset of the marker, so you could well be marked down if they're having a bad day, or up if they're feeling generous. This is the very definition of unfair.
Also, I know I'm splitting hairs here; but the University doesn't want 'talent' . They want someone who is willing to dedicate themselves and work hard. Talent is nice to have, but ancillary.
How do you kill that which has no life?
They are good when they amplify a high base score, but useless on their own.
That's the key to what Strunk and White were saying, that every word, sentence, etc. needs to have a function in the overall tale. Colorful words are great when they add nuance and flavor, but sometimes it devolves into filler. Most of this girl's essay was pure mood setting, which she didn't need 'cause that's not the story she's really telling. Since this is an MIT essay for an engineering spot, they essay could reduce down to:
My world is eight friends in a bed meant for two, the hidden tunnels of the mall, and semi-weekly trips to ogle gadgets at Best Buy. Widespread panic for Y2K made my father teach me more about system security than I ever wanted to know at the age of ten. I drooled the first time I saw a real G5, and put together my first circuit board when I was seven. The county fair gave me an addiction to funnel cake, the college nearby gave me my first look at a real milling machine, parties at my house gave me Dr. Pepper stains over a large percentage of my clothes, my neighborâ(TM)s dog gave me a hatred of anything smaller than a mailbox that can bark, and my introduction to broadband began a love affair with the world that has yet to die.
As fuzzy logic becomes more and more obsolete (in humans, at least), boolean values have come to rule all. Precision, accuracy, the Styrofoam cup holding your coffee, and the microprocessor in your toaster oven are all a product of infinitely many zeros and ones, a concept I find both irresistibly ridiculous and intriguing.Barring world disaster or a dramatic cult revival, technology is my future.
There's still tons of personality 'cause of her writing style and the great personal details, but all that detail isn't lost in generic reminiscence of suburban/rural living. This is 210 words and could easily be edited down further.
open source modern art: laser taggi
All good answers, and all less than 25 words.- 76 words total. Shows creativity, fast thinking (didn't take long to come up with these 5), and a sense of humour. Short and sweet and to the point.
(75 if you actually insert a first and last name in place of ["insert name here"], because some nazi is going to count.)
Since when do only politicians do all the things I enumerated? Only politicians lie? Only politicians do crack? Cheat on their spouses? Commit fraud? Skim over the "executive summary" because they can't be arsed to read anything more than half a page long?
You're the one that brought up the "leader" thing ... and far too many "leaders" today are only there because they happened to be the ones that were there, not because of any merit. Just chance and having the right connections. they still lie, bankrupt the business after draining the employee pension funds dry, etc. Look how many people thought Alan Greenspan was such a good leader in the world of finance ... or examine just how many billions companies owned by Warren Buffet got in bail-out funds. Or the disaster known as Sarah Palin. Leaders? In many cases, only because people are too stupid to realize the truth. That "once a leader" doesn't mean "always a leader", and "you can fool some of the people some of the time" is good advice to take to heart, and that a dose of cynicism is a healthy antidote to a diet of bullshit.
This article cannot be left to stand with out a link to one of the most entertaining essays I've ever read. Now, unfortunately, it's not an MIT essay (instead, it's for NYU), but it's at least hosted at MIT, and therefore I feel that it is contextually meaningful.
Kid-proof tablet..
Reviewers seem to be idiots or gullible. I got to hear what reviewers at a top school considered the best essay from the new york area.
It was an essentially generic essay on 9/11 about some kid who couldn't use her parent's $2million apartment for a month. Waist thick engineered heart string pulling bullshit and the reviewers couldn't see through it. There was absolutely nothing in it that could have elicited actual sympathy (no dead relatives, no living in a makeshift shelter, nothing) if you thought about it for 30 seconds but the reviewers fell for it hook, line and sinker.
You're reading too much into it.
Your explanations are sound and logical, but the piece still looks, walks & talks like gazillion other flowery wordfests devoid of substance all of us who ever had a crush on a pretentious girl had to read through (and appraise!).
Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Quixote by Borges for more than 500 words on the subject of reader response.
"Blah blah blah." - [citation needed]
The essay should be axed as should be pretty much all essays for all major colleges.
The problem with essays is not that they are a negative or a positive indicator of whatever they are supposed to be indicating, its that they cannot be graded properly they are not graded properly so presently they are a cruel joke perpetrated on poor applicants that work their asses off to write an essay that will be read for 4 minutes by some professional grader and graded on some completely random basis.
Essays are a relic from the time when classes are small the applicants were few and a single person could read all the essays and at least attempt to grade them on a common basis. Right now colleges receive tens of thousands of essays that are graded by multiple professional graders that can only spend minimal time reading each essay and there is really no way to ensure that the same standards are kept from grader to grader.
So even if the essay is a wonderful way to differentiate applicants it should be scrapped everywhere because it simply cannot be graded properly.
I mean how could you possible ensure that your grader will like your essay? There are some people out there that dislike even Shakespeare's writing. How can you be sure that your grader will like yours?
**dirty secrets of standardized testing industry**
How the difficulty of items is determined is its own SNAFU. As an item writer, I learned that the goal was not to test content knowledge or even problem solving but to foster ambiguity such that one "community of interpretation" (a Stanley Fish term from his famous essay on interpreting irreducible tropes in Milton) would likely be divided from another. As your post attests, items that yield the pretty curve are considered successful items, never mind what they actually test.
ETS, whose sister company I used to work for, keeps an army of "psychometricians" to justify and perpetuate their arcane assessment methods, and they keep those PhDs well away from the media or any outsiders. They aren't interested in learning at all, psychometics is the blackbox that protects publishers from lawsuits should anyone whose college prospects and earning potential attempt to sue. Honestly, giving up on the essay question signals a sad resignation to the opacity of clean curves.
Computer adaptive testing is a hot potato because not only do the same people score quite differently when retested, scores can be wildly affected by things like font size, color contrast, and having questions read aloud as well as printed on screen. If that's the case, then content and complexity aren't what's being tested at all.
What does it mean that someone tests well? There's a long list of answers to that. Leaping to the myopic answer that engineers only need to answer the spatial reasoning questions on an IQ test misses the complexity of the problem entirely.
Just wondering. Whatever you mentioned looks like reaching a local minima. In this case, wont simulated annealing work? That should take care of the problems you mentioned, right?
rajmohan_h@yahoo.com
Communication skills are essential for that.
Except... Essay is the antithesis of communicating.
If you look at communication as a "two-way process in which there is an exchange and progression of thoughts, feelings or ideas (energy) towards a mutually accepted goal or direction (information)."
Essay, is just fine and dandy for "expressing", ranting, giving speeches and eulogies and all other forms of monologues - where you expect NO REPLY from the reader/listener.
Also, it being a "word wall", you will still probably get a huge number of applicants with zero communications skills - who just happen to know how better to express themselves using a slow, editable, one-way, written form.
Instead of actually communicating with one or more persons and exchanging information and ideas in real time.
What it will MOST DEFINITELY give you though, is a base for subjective discrimination based NOT on applicants "communication skills" - but on his or her "way of thinking" instead.
Essentially, if one gets in based on his/her essay - it is because they fit the "group-think" profile. Leave your "creativity" at home kids and fall in line.
On the other hand, if they get rejected based on their essays, it is because they are guilty of committing that much loved slashdot staple - the thought crime.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
OK, after doing all that now convince NASA it's too cold to launch a shuttle today.
http://www.asktog.com/books/challengerExerpt.html
Communication matters, even to engineers and failures in communication lead to engineering failures and people getting killed. Edward Tufte makes a convincing argument that if they had been better able to present and communicate their ideas they would have been able to make their engineering point in an understandable way and saved lives.
I'm not familiar with the details of MIT admissions, but I can comment based on the admissions in engineering universities here in Finland.
The basic problems is very similar: our equivalent of the SAT:s (nationally standardized examns at the end of highschool) are bad measurements for selecting students, because most of the would-be engineers score in the top 10% of the country in math and physics. The solution here is to hold separate entrance examns that are common for all the engineering universities. The material is basically the same (high school maths and physics / chemistry), but the difficulty is set higher: most high schools students would get no points on it, only very few can score full points, but it nicely measures the differences between the good and the best. In practice getting 50% right will get you into most programmes, 85-90% into even the most popular / exclusive.
Like Jim_v2000 said:
"An essay is a shitty way to select engineering students and doesn't gauge anything other than their ability to make up 500 words of bullshit. "
A very important part of a selection system is fairness: it's very hard to objectively measure differences in "Drive, ambition, ideals, character, motivation", so it's better to stick to the skills that can be measured and are relevant to the subject.
In Germany, they "fixed" things, by simply modifying grammar to be closer to the most common errors students made in the last years. So now "they are no errors anymore". Wait for nature to invent even bigger idiots, and for them to "fix" the language again.
The rule is: If the students are becoming too dumb (500 words is "larger than life"?? hello? do they mean "mentally challenged life"?): Lower the bar.
It worked well for evolution of humanity, so it will work well for education too. Oh, wait...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Can't the algorithm just drop back to earlier difficulties occasionally to check for consistency, and only finish the test when answers at varying levels of difficulty seem to have become consistent AND the high-resolution questions have levelled off at 50/50? Or would this make the tests too long?
I might be missing something, but the method as you describe it just sounds like it's too simplistically written, not like a fundamental problem with adaptive testing.
This.
Just a few years ago I was taking standard tests for college. A few colleges I was applying to required me to take the SAT Subject Test for Physics. I took the test and got a 750. This sounds like a fantastic score (and it is pretty good) although the mean for the test that year was 643 with a standard deviation of 107, putting me exactly one standard deviation away. Not only that, a large number of students (including a few friends of mine and some people I later met in college) got 800s. However, I'm the only person out of those people to score a 5 (max) on both calculus-based physics AP tests. What happened?
Easy. I took the SAT Physics my junior year and the physics AP my senior year. In that year was my first exposure to electricity and magnetism, which comprises ~20% of the SAT Physics. Everybody I know who got an 800 had already taken some form of E&M when they took the test, but I was left to try to figure out how an electric field diagram works. Does my lower score mean that I'm not as good at physics? No. Could I have gotten an 800 after having already learned all of the material? Probably.
What is "The reason I turn off NPR?"
(Not normally a bad radio station, but damn, the slice of life observations they occasionally have are annoying as hell.)
Find someone who CAN do that, and have them do so, for a cut of the result.
That is possible, but you have to communicate well enough to explain to them why your idea has potential and why they should care.
If you can't raise funding yourself and you can't manage people at least reasonably well, then chances are "they" will not be working for you. You will be working for "them".
In high school I absolutely hated questions like that. I could never answer them without copious amounts of BS. Almost nobody could. Looking back now, the proper answer to that prompt would have been something like this:
I am 17. I have been cognitively capable of understanding my experiences in a way sufficient to answer this question for only a few years. Again, I am 17. I have experienced less in my life than you have forgotten in yours. I am completely typical in these regards. There may be geniuses that were capable of abstract thought by age 7, or go-getters who had done more by 13 than some people will do in their lifetimes. Good for them. Even they will not be able to understand their experiences as well now as they will in 10 years. And even after those 10 years have passed, they still won't be able to answer this question perfectly.
The simple fact is I have done nothing special and am nothing special. That is why I'm going to college; For the opportunity to do something special. That is why many people go to college. Even then many people will still never do or be anything special. That likely includes me. That likely includes many of the geniuses and "well-traveled" that you're inclined to admit. If you admitted people randomly you would probably find just as many alumni that do become some special.
You're giving a prompt about the past to people with barely any past. You're doing so in order to determine if they are allowed the greatest opportunity for their future they may ever have had in their lives. You don't see a problem with this?
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Seriously, essays about my past bugged me. I was a kid. I barely had a past to speak of, let alone one that was in any way special. The whole reason I wanted to go to college was to change that!
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Hmm. With a lot refinement this essay could work. Of course it required me to be 10 years older in order to better understand why these essays bugged me. And it would fail miserably because it didn't fit their prompt.
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Alternative TLDR version: Admissions essays suck.