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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 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]
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.
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
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..
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.
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.
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.)