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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.]
Because real applications should be measured in characters
Has anyone considered that requiring a minimum length for an essay does not improve the quality of the essay? If a student can't create a convincing and well thought out essay without such a restriction, then I would think that it shows a flaw in their writing ability.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
"Frist post!"
I'm ambivalent. On one side, it's true that this essay can show a lot about yourself, maybe even give insight to both the evaluators and to yourself. It's also true that 500 words is actually rather short in and of itself. I think it's enough to write something if you're succinct and after a lot of rewriting and synthesizing.
On the other hand, however, what they're trying to do here is to downplay the whole thing a bit. It might have been a nice tradition, but as a student who stresses a lot over somewhat negligible things, I can honestly say that doing this 500-word essay would be nerve-wracking. By shortening it and spacing it out in multiple bursts, you reduce overall tension. I can't tell how many times my stress has penalized my grades; maybe the MIT has realized that they could've been losing potential geniuses over simple things like that (I'm growing things out of proportions I know, but small things do stack up eventually) and they're trying to correct the course.
In any case, I just hope this doesn't announce a lowering of the MIT's standards.
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? Along that point, how do you pick the kid who's going to make MIT look good rather than hiding out in a room in Baker for four years? They need to lean heavily on the more subjective portions of the application like the essays and work portfolios in order to get any sort of meaningful picture of the applicant. That's also why this move makes perfect sense, splitting up the essay gets them a view from different angles without sacrificing any depth. After all, the 500 word essays didn't have any depth to begin with, and a 125 word essay is less likely to get polished to death by outside help.
You gotta find first gear in your giant robot car
Word count was NEVER indicative of writing skill.
I have seen 15 page reports that were an eyesore to read through. On the other hand, some of the most touching and enjoyable writing I've had the pleasure of coming across were only a few words.
With that said, this change could be looked at from two angles. The first is more acute, in that essays will now be judged on a much higher level than previous ones. MIT was always known as the creative school, and its students are largely responsible for that title. Therefore, they should be able to meet this challenge, which really isn't any more challenging than a longer essay would be.
Conversely, it can be argued that MIT is lowering their standards to appeal to a more "fleeting" generation. "The kids" now have Twitter, and AIM is pretty well-saturated in their environment. 500 words in a world where txtspk (that's textspeak to you old farts :-p) rules the roost? Are you mad? Think of the children!!!
Either way, if a prospective student really wants to get into MIT (or any other prestigious institution, for that matter), they will find the way. This is hardly the deterrant to that.
By the way, 500 words is HARDLY lengthy. For some essays, that's a warmup. For some research reports, that's the introductory statement. Talk to me when we're at six page minimums, mmkay?
... axe me about my high school diploma.
The world I come from is full of oak trees and rain, warm cats on cold nights, and raucous college parties across the street. The sky over my home matches the grey in my eyes; the barbed wire fence around Lake Sequoyah is commemorated eternally by the disfiguration of my left hip.
Am i the only one who puked at that?
Good night. I just read the example essay and I think I puked in my mouth a little bit there. So much banal "I love life and I'm nerdy, tee hee" drivel, piled layer upon layer, with no coherent structure. Why is this student proud of it at all?
If anything, I would say it justifies the decision to remove the essay quite well.
It's not like you're going for a liberal arts degree there - grades and standardized testing scores are what matter at MIT. What you wrote in an essay's hardly going to influence what you do in a technical environment like that.
Which is incredibly short-sighted. The world needs more diverse, creative types who can communicate with everyone else - people who can write. They serve as a bridge between the fierce logicians of the world to whom everything is a computation.
I work in software, I am a tech writer. I find myself working with incredibly smart, talented people who often work next to each other and yet never talk to each other. So I end up acting as the catalyst in order to get anything accomplished. But it works.
I like to think good writers work as a creative lubricant between the anti-social and brilliant. Maybe MIT could use a few more of those types. Of course since I applied to MIT years back and wasn't accepted, maybe this is just the rejected ego talking.
Also, considering that more than 60% of the population are probably foreign, it might help to have a couple native English speakers there. Just my jingoistic opinion.
Also, 500 words is not a long essay. And standardized tests and grades are a poor judge of talent.
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."
If the scores are all the same, then it really doesn't matter who gets in. 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.
That said, a first come, first served system would be appropriate when determine who gets accepted when scores are identical.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
Per tradition, I carefully avoided reading the fine article. And then you come along and toss that nauseous paragraph at me anyway.
Application denied!
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
It wasn't creative writing, it was about what you wanted to do with your life, and how MIT might help.
And no, the numbers are not all that matter. The Institute is trying to turn out better rounded alums
than that, hence the numerous humanities and writing requirements.
Were that I say, pancakes?
Anyone who can't write a coherent 500-word (or thereabouts) essay shouldn't be allowed into a university such as MIT. Period. Requiring it is kind of like setting a minimum GPA or test score: an easy way to quickly cull a bunch of idiots from the applicant pool.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I read that essay, and I can't see what would a better examle for removing the essay requirement than that essay itself.
Full of artificial, decorative use of language, presenting trivial details as meaningful by using way too many words to describe them, expressing unoriginal, standardized opinions in a supposedly creative way. It's bad enough when a journalist pads his writing with such nonsense, I certainly don't want to work with another engineer whose primary outstanding skill is writing of such garbage.
If I was asked to write an essay on such a topic, my answer would be:
I was a nigger.
Fortunately where I studied the school has a proper admission procedure -- that is, a sequence of tests with complex problems in varios areas of Math and Physics, interview, and if I remember correctly, minimal essay designed to test applicant's ability to express things. That was, of course, not in US.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
500 words? The whole essay, or just before the \0 character?
Oh wait...
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Granted. But what good is a world-class education in research if one lacks aptitude in communication? The greatest insight is useless if its discoverer cannot appropriately convey it.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
I re-read my old college entrance essay, and I'm horribly shocked anyone at all accepted me!
Especially Carnegie Mellon . . . must have been my technical skills =P
That is an absolutely silly idea, that identical test scores means identical potential. First of all, after a certain amount, the scores are nearly identical. With the way the tests are graded, one question can be the difference between a 760 and an 800 on the SAT. Can you really say that the person who got the 800 SAT is better? Too many qualities outside of a test need to be considered. What if the 760 grew up in an inner city neighborhood, and was working 2 jobs in highschool to support his single parent? An essay is a perfect opportunity to explain the circumstances of what makes you you and what you have to offer. Drive, ambition, ideals, character, motivation are all important characteristics in the admissions process at a place at MIT, and they look for people with more than just good test scores. They know that the same test scores can belong to two widely different people-maybe even one they want and one they don't.
Atleast they're leaving something left besides SAT scores and GPA. I can see people asking for all subjective material removed from applications. Then it would come down to pure SAT scores and GPAs. Now highschools are going to have to be more focused on improving their ranking compared to some other school. Additionally, the old adages of schools looking for well rounded applicants would head out the window.
{rant} /. poster puts more effort into their 'All your bases belong...' comments than some engineers put into their documentation.
As a side note since we're on the topic of removing some form of written material, I'm sick of working with engineers who write procedures, functional specs, test plans, white papers that are as if they never even bothered to read it over after writing it. I bet the average
I've even worked with consultants who charged us $350k for a datacenter design; and while technically solid, the quality of the writing was on par with my 10year old and was about 2 steps away from the short hand notation one might use in an email, SMS or tweet.
{/rant}
Here's what the writer said. Note that she got into MIT.
"I still feel that it's one of the most creative, introspective, and thoughtful pieces I have ever written, and I sure couldn't have done it in 250 words."
WTF.
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.
my neighbor's dog gave me a hatred of anything smaller than a mailbox that can bark,
If I can eat what you call a dog at one sitting, it isn't a dog.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
What you wrote in an essay's hardly going to influence what you do in a technical environment like that.
Yeah, cause creativity and communications skills contribute nothing to technical accomplishments, right? I've worked with people who think this way. The smallest issue takes three emails and a face to face meeting to resolve because it never occurs to them that how they write actually matters. Having skills and interests outside of your field makes you smarter within your field, and easier to work with too.
Visit the
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]
As in a job interview, the criteria for accepting an applicant for college isn't going to reliably measure potential, ability, or intelligence.
It's really a crap shoot hidden behind a facade of plausible but ineffective practices.
Honestly. She's not that good.
On her blog she writes,
I liked my essay every bit as much as I remembered I did, so I thought I'd post it on here. I must say again, this is a piece I am awfully proud of... Word count: 447. Couldn't have done it in less.
Emphasis on the "Couldn't have done it in less."
Please. She starts her essay with a sentence reminiscent of a dark and stormy night,
The world I come from is full of oak trees and rain, warm cats on cold nights, and raucous college parties across the street.
And continues to non-inform us of anything but her ability to fill space,
The sky over my home matches the grey in my eyes; the barbed wire fence around Lake Sequoyah is commemorated eternally by the disfiguration of my left hip.
And she concludes her first paragraph with a phrase cleverly coined yet meaningless for all but one,
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.
I could go on, but I've been terribly bored.
Her essay could easily have been summed up in 250 words. She has demonstrated that she can connect subjects and verbs and direct objects in an acceptably understandable way. Mission accomplished. But she certainly did not need a 500 word limit.
My page.
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?
For concrete ways to downsize essays like hers, refer to the Elements of Style.
My favorite quote from the book,
Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
My page.
The problem with all test is that they assess the rote knowledge, but not the creativity of the applicant. Even the GRE and tests like that test facts that can be recalled, albeit in an indirect manner, not ability to see solutions. This is why we have all these graduates from major colleges all saying that we can't possibly live without oil without severely impacting our standard of living. They can't see anymore than what is in front of them. They can't think of anyone that is not directly connected to their extremely myopic reality. Mostly they cannot imagine a world any different form what they were raised in.
Of course, since the people in charge are the exact same myopic people I speak of, the creative activity will be building a tower our newspaper. Something that looks creative but has little risk.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Gee, and I thought the primary communications medium in science and engineering was mathematics.
Who did they axe about this?
Students face a distinctly un-level playing field when it comes to the admissions essay. I don't mean to be cynical, but I've noticed that these essays often read like professionally written short stories. If anything, schools need to impose greater transparency on the essay-writing process. Otherwise, those who come from families that can afford to spend inordinate amounts on outside "help" will have a significant and unfair advantage over everyone else.
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.
Does anyone consider length an indicator of good writing? In many cases, no. Technical writing is already too long. As Mark Twain once said, "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."
Good point. Maybe they should have changed the requirement to an object of up to 1 kilogram.
How about a 500 word math problem? It makes more sense as an entrance criteria for MIT than creative writing.
It's not like you're going for a liberal arts degree there - grades and standardized testing scores are what matter at MIT.
Having worked with many people who made grades and passed standardized tests while maintaining a shockingly remedial actual understanding, and having met some brilliant mathematicians with no skill whatsoever in communicating their ideas, I can't agree. I also think that an essay gives a student with an inferior education but superior education a chance to distinguish him or herself even though s/he may not have been taught the tricks to taking standardized tests.
Anyone modding the parent insightful needs to go back to college, if they haven't been there in the first place.
What you wrote in an essay's hardly going to influence what you do in a technical environment like that.
I would assert that one's ability to craft a finely-tuned essay can directly correlate with how one writes code, expresses technical information, and pays attention to detail in the work that he or she does.
Save that space for things that are important - research abstracts, statements of interest, letters of recommendation, etc.
All easily bullshitted. Personally, I believe that any admissions counselor would be able to determine with a pretty good degree of accuracy how much effort a student would make in their collegiate studies based on how much effort they put into an essay. Letters of recommendation? Please. They are only what get your foot in the door, but otherwise have as much worth as the paper you wipe your ass with. Any college recruiting students with the hope that they eventually become successful academics whose works in turn inflate the reputation of the college should expect from them deep, well-reasoned thought, articulate with meaningful expression, and pay strong attention to detail. The best method to meter these characteristics is through creative essay.
Do you get extra points if your essay begins with the phrase "It was a dark and stormy night."?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The world needs more diverse, creative types who can communicate with everyone else. - people who can write. They serve as a bridge between the fierce logicians of the world to whom everything is a computation.
And to invent the jump to conclusions mat.
And of course while the college board may choose to cap SAT scores to within 3 standard deviations of the mean, that doesn't mean there AREN'T people who fall well outside that range.
But does that not also result in boring and dry text? If the aim of your writing is to convey a message, and (at least for myself) boring bits of text are a lot harder to remember then mission failure. Think of metaphors and colourful text as multipliers. They are good when they amplify a high base score, but useless on their own.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
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?
In my career of twenty years as a software developer I have yet to be asked to write an essay. The closest I have come to that is a few comment blocks is source code that nobody reads. I'm not saying that reading and writing skill aren't useful, just not applicable to my job.
125 words isn't an essay. It's a blurb. Let's face it, it's potentially one well crafted paragraph. Did you realise your response was 137 words long - thus exceeding the revised requirement.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
If the scores are all the same, then it really doesn't matter who gets in. 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.
If there's any reason why these kinds of things tend to be bullshit, it has nothing to do with the fact that these are engineering students, or that engineers can't or shouldn't learn to use language as a tool (or, for that matter, that they shouldn't learn to bullshit).
The problem comes in the intersection of the purpose of the essay and the formation of the questions. It's an admissions essay, which means that whatever you're asked to say or whatever you're ostensibly saying, the purpose is to say whatever impresses admissions officers and get admitted to the college. Everybody knows this, and it reduces the ability of most people to speak authentically (and increases their tendency to bullshit). Particularly with essays that ask people to talk about themselves, because no matter how many distinct things there are about individual people, even smart people, there's an awful lot of sameness running through the human condition. Meanwhile, admissions officers are looking for distinction. Talk about cross-purposes.
Clare Bayley's suggestion "change the prompts, not the length" is some clear thinking. Prompt the applicant away from a self-focus and you untangle the better part of the tension I describe above, while still allowing applicants to reveal expressiveness and distinctive thinking.
Tweet, tweet.
Only that won't fly. I have to agree, at the end of the day, you need objective criteria (if only to stave off lawsuits).
However, I am saying, frankly, there really isn't anything all that wrong with the "because I said so" school of thought.
Picking a good candidate for for a school or a job or whatever, is a lot like porn or literature - I can't tell you, a priori, what "it" is, but I can tell you when I see it.
In my personal life, I am a cs major, and I have been married to a psychologist for many years. She tests children for special learning needs. Since we both work at home, I often see fleeting glimpses of her clients, and make snap judgments about them. Later, I'll say "there is something not quite right about that kid", or "you had a gifted one today, right?".
I am also not shy about my observations of "civilians" in general situations.
My wife is not too happy about my opinionated views, but, she does admit I am "always right". She is genuinely befuddled about this ability of mine, and I admit it is not of any commercial use, but it serves me well. So, I guess the only practical use would be to have a panel of judges to pick, based on "because". If you had a majority rules, and did longitudinal studies on picks, you could eventually weed out the "bad" judges... But I am just rambling now.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I deal with a lot of people coming and going here at my office (although I am not in HR, I am an SME in our business), and I can tell you that when we are looking at hiring potentials, the first thing we look at is the cover letter rather than their actual CV content. Once in an interview, sure, discussions about past experience and the like are valued, but just as valuable is the ability to communicate and to mesh into the current staff we have.
The grandparent post said that identical scores mean identical potential, and that is utter bollocks. Two people might both be intelligent and perform well with tests. One of these might get on well with others, have good listening skills while the other is only interested in their own opinion. One may may be liked and respected by his team the other resented and ridiculed. How are these two even remotely identical?
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
I went to MIT back in the late 70s early '80s and got a BSEE. One of the instructors in course 6 was well known for his opinion that engineering was too limited in scope and that in order to understand how to be useful in the world, students needed a much stronger liberal arts background. He argued for a 6-year undergrad program, the first 2 years of which were to be essentially non-technical.
At the time I thought I was some smart kid. Now I am in my 50s and I agree with him 100%. Honestly, the technical stuff was easy, and the people who really made an impact understood the human and emotional dimensions alongside the technical. Engineers dismiss this, and I believe they are poorer for it.
Also, 500 words is not a long essay
It is for the type of questions these essays are usually supposed to answer. I remember the 124/250 word shorts MIT required back when I applied (didn't get in, but because of grades) being perfectly reasonable. I'm a massive cheerleader for more writing in engineering (I'm a writing tutor/computer engineering student who constantly tells science/engineering kids why the skills they're picking up in an assignment will be useful later), but I thought the girl's critique (and essay) was a perfect example of the kind of pretentious purple prose that nobody, least of all engineers, needs practice in. Short answers force students to get to the point and be careful with their syntax and sentence structure, which are writing valuable skills for engineers and sciences. Good writers can be just as good with 125 words as 500, and horrible writers skill doesn't change with length requirements. I think the articles are blowing this up to be a much bigger deal then it actually is.
open source modern art: laser taggi
The little known fact is that the 500 word essay has been replaced by the much smaller and more efficient 100 word essay- in the spirit of Moore's Law.
I don't know if you ever applied for a scholarship or a school that wanted an essay, but let me tell you how it works:
Every one who's writing KNOWS exactly what the person reading it is looking for, and embellishes their life experience to fit that, thus making themselves look as good as possible. So you end up with the best bullshitters winning.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
grades and standardized testing scores are what matter at MIT. What you wrote in an essay's hardly going to influence what you do in a technical environment like that.
Ah... no.
I interviewed with MIT, and they were quite clear: there are far more students with excellent (by MIT standards) test scores and grades. What they're looking for in an applicant is someone who they think will take the education they're given and run with it. Someone who will excel with or without MIT, but (they hope) moreso with than without.
My guess is that they're removing the essay in order to speed the process up and get more people in front of the interviewers, which is really where they do their selection. The interviewer is an alum who will size up the potential student on several different scales. Some of the people admitted aren't even traditional successful students (though these are a tiny fraction each year).
Even IF you get a LibArts degree, the essay probably doesn't tell college admissions anything anymore.
NOt unless you fly completely off the handle and start ranting about New World Order conspiracies or the proper way to eat a Jalapeno.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Absolutely not. MIT's interest is not to find the most capable geeks, it is to find balanced individuals with a broad range of interests, who are are likely to become the leaders of tomorrow. Communication skills are essential for that.
Being technically strong is only one ingredient of success, even in technical disciplines.
As compared to a 500 word essay that you probably wrote with outside assistance?
Arguably, the ability to seek good outside assistance says as much about your likelihood of success in a University context as any other ability you might have.
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.
If you depend entirely on standardized metrics, you're also going to be unfair: your metrics won't correlate perfectly and perhaps not even well with what you're trying to measure (particularly intelligence, the measure of which is itself somewhat subjective). And even to the extent they do, at some point, they will fail to distinguish between applicants, at which point you're back to using subjective or random criteria. And this is to say nothing about those with the resources to game any known system of metrics.
This doesn't mean that standardized metrics have no merit; there's a reason why higher education continues to use them even though everyone knows they have real limits. There's also a reason why there tends to a point in the process for subjective human judgments: it offers a chance to make distinctions where the metrics can't, it offers a chance for amelioration the the metrics may have blind spots, and finally, since at the end of the day it's pretty much unavoidable there will be some subjective and potentially unfair element, you may as well try to make the subjective part of the decision as refined and plain as possible.
Tweet, tweet.
Suddenly I understand why so much sci fi written by engineers reads like someone reciting the minutes of that last IEEE meeting.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
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.
Actually, they want people who are likely to be successful, and become leaders of tomorrow. These are the people that will go out and advertise their alma mater to the next generation. They are also the kind of people who end up making the big alumni donations.
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
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.
I hope you're not planning to apply for a statistics degree with that little essay. It would be the definition of fair if they refused you. There's variability in which standardized questions any particular applicant is exposed to. The coverage of material is not exactly the same from test to test, and might impact one student differently than another. It's also possible to cross validate subjective appraisals, if one is willing to go to enough trouble. It's possible that the variability in the subjective appraisal is on roughly the same scale as variability due to test composition. That hardly strikes me as the definition of unfair. Usually we reserve the strong definition of "unfair" to systemic effects rather than random, impersonal, not every day is equal effects. Is the testing supposed to be less variable than life itself? In 500 words, explain how.
And to think that in the workplace, writing is actually the LEAST important skill.
Believe it or not, among skills needed in the work place, the most important is listening. Then comes speaking, then reading, then writing.
Completely BASS ACKWARDS to the way it's taught in school.
If the scores are all the same, then it really doesn't matter who gets in. 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.
The very smartest people will not only have good grades and test scores, but will be able to analyse a problem like a writing assignment and be able to respond relevantly and skilfully. It's true that most high school graduates don't have the maturity to approach a problem like an application essay correctly (I certainly didn't), but that doesn't mean it can't be a very effective indicator of ability.
You seem to be operating on the (completely wrongheaded) assumption that the best engineers and scientists are one dimensional learners who focus all their energies in their narrow field, but you would be hard pressed to find a single truly great scientist who fit that mold.
... the scathing critique took the form of... AN ESSAY!!!
Brevity being the soul of wit, I'm glad they were brief.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
For concrete ways to downsize essays like hers, refer to the Elements of Style.
My favorite quote from the book,
Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
And as with most manuals of style, this can be taken wildly out of context.
The poster you're referring to is complaining that the mechanical details of what's being discussed didn't need the descriptive and alliterative treatment in order to convey their meaning. Of course, that's true on some level, but it's also not what the manual of style that you quote is trying to caution against. Let's take an example
The sky over my home matches the grey in my eyes; the barbed wire fence around Lake Sequoyah is commemorated eternally by the disfiguration of my left hip.
What's being communicated, here? I read it as a nod to some of the informal check-lists that MIT admissions wants to fill up. She's aware of the world outside of her chosen field, capable of ignoring rules when exploring and aware of the consequences of doing so. This is an admission of trespassing in an application essay. It's exactly the kind of honesty that they want to see, but at the same time, it requires careful introduction so that the reader understands that the student has matured from the experience and isn't simply bragging.
Also, not surprisingly, manuals of style mean little to someone reviewing an application to a top school (though MIT perhaps slightly less so than some). The assumption is that you could probably quote from it. What's interesting is where and when you choose to deviate from the standard and when you don't. The same is true in poetry. Iambic pentameter to novices is about 5 iambs per line. To those who understand the form, it's not nearly so simple. It's about setting the reader up to expect a certain rhythm and then deviating at key times in order to control the experience.
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.
Meh. You can successfully distinguish levels of domain knowledge well, who knows their computer science or mathematics better, maybe you can successfully make distinctions about someone's logical thinking capacity and vague distinctions about their problem solving approach.
But the question of which hard questions distinguish high levels of intelligence -- particularly intelligence necessary to create a good product? That itself is going to be subjective.
Tweet, tweet.
I hope you're not planning to apply for a statistics degree with that little essay. It would be the definition of fair if they refused you. There's variability in which standardized questions any particular applicant is exposed to. The coverage of material is not exactly the same from test to test, and might impact one student differently than another. It's also possible to cross validate subjective appraisals, if one is willing to go to enough trouble. It's possible that the variability in the subjective appraisal is on roughly the same scale as variability due to test composition. That hardly strikes me as the definition of unfair. Usually we reserve the strong definition of "unfair" to systemic effects rather than random, impersonal, not every day is equal effects. Is the testing supposed to be less variable than life itself? In 500 words, explain how.
Yes
Also, it took me 3 attempts to parse that, I hope you're not planning to apply for anything with that little essay.
How do you kill that which has no life?
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.)
That's how many words ice's comment was, for anyone who thingk that 500 words is long.
An O(500 word) essay is really not any more difficult than a post on slashdot. A well-reasoned essay should probably take roughly that long just to get enough supporting points in, depending on what you want to say. That's five freakin' paragraphs. Three, really, after you subtract the opening and closing paragraphs of a formal essay.
500 words is easy to write without even thinking about it.
Now what I don't understand is how Clare can be proud of that essay after five years. Or how her advisor let her put that in the application package. Or how she managed to get in to MIT with it. I'm not saying my applications were any better, but there's no way in hell I'm going to go trying to find them and read them again. Let alone post publicly.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
"My inner cynic wants to say 'tough, it's their fault if they produce some bland over-processed generic drivel,'" says the woman who wrote this bland, over-processed, generic drivel for her own essay. "Word count: 447. Couldn't have done it in less." What an amazing coincidence that her essay needed 447 out of 500 words. It didn't need 505 and she had to make it worse by cutting good stuff, and she didn't need 200 but felt obligated to pad it out. Truly amazing.
College admission essays are bullshit. Ones that ask for biography are doubly so. Like the interview question, "What is your greatest weakness?", responding with honesty is usually the wrong policy. Instead you build up a carefully honed lie designed to impress the interviewer. There is no benefit to this for anyone involved.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Since when is "leader" synonymous with "politician"?
Do you really think being technically smart is all it takes to make things happen, even in technology? Tell me: even if you do invent the next internet or the next google, etc, how are you going to: communicate your idea to possible investors? Come up with a decent business plan? Raise the funding to turn this idea into a successful enterprise? Find and properly motivate employees?
Even in basic science the picture isn't much different. Look at the Nobel laureates announced this week. Brilliant scientists? Sure. But also excellent communicators and leaders.
Is 500 words really THAT long? Most people on Slashdot have written posts longer than that.
It's no good being absolutely brilliant but without means of communicating your brilliant discoveries to the outside world.
I say; if you can't write a 500 word essay, you won't succeed in a scientific field.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
8 words
Response favouring brevity: 163 words.
Hate to see what you'd write if you were in favour of "the kind of pretentious purple prose that nobody, least of all engineers, needs practice in".
Every one who's writing KNOWS exactly what the person reading it is looking for, and embellishes their life experience to fit that, thus making themselves look as good as possible. So you end up with the best bullshitters winning.
Everyone may know that, but few people realize that someone who has to read the same crap day after day will appreciate even the slightest deviation from the norm. If you are erudite enough to write coherently on any topic handed to you, you can pretty much do whatever you want. They'll take you.
"Hmm, I have to choose between some guy who apparently has a brain and penis and some guy who's trying his darndest to stick his tongue up my ass. What to do..."
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
It's just as silly to think a response to an essay question indicates level of potential.
The applicant can say whatever they think the admissions people want to hear, and get a team of people to help them make the best essay possible.
Exactly! First you write about the Jump-To-Conclusions mat and then some engineer builds it. Isn't that what happened with the escalator and A. Clarke? Sheesh...500 words...any good bullshit artist can do that in less then 30 minutes. Is that too much to ask from the next breed of military industrial complex think tankers?
I think therefore I can't be ~TTNH
They might respond skillfully, but not as skillfully as the guy who's BS'ing the essay.
In other words, the applicant who responds more skillfully may actually be the person who won't succeed as a student...
Your real problems start when you're a Caucasian male from the US. "How will he help make our community a more diverse place?" puzzles Admissions.
I am a tester.
It is not that easy to do. Something like the SAT needs to be able to ascertain the level of a very broad population of users. That is done by targeting items at examinees of a certain ability, using item response theory difficulty estimates acquired in pilot. Yes, you could add more difficult questions, but those are going to render very little information about most people who take them, because they won't get them right. Because the edges of the bell curve are so thin, throwing a bunch of hard questions at the top end will water down the results for the majority of users. Ideally, you want most of your items that are very close to the level of the examinees, so you get nice "high-resolution" (although no one uses that term but me, since I came in from IT and explain everything as though it were a computer) discriminations of ability for the most people possible.
The workaround for this problem is to tailor the test to the examinee, real-time, with computer-adaptive testing. So let's say you get an item with a difficulty estimate of 1 correct; now the computer will hit you with one at 1.2, for example, and keep ramping up until you kind of level off at getting 50/50 right, which is where it decides you belong. Once it has you figured out, it either just throws easy ones at you so you feel good about yourself, or starts serving up items still undergoing pilot testing. Either way, what you do after that point will not affect your score.
This sounds great, and it would be great, if it worked reliably. The problem is that the thing has to kick in somewhere at the beginning of the test, and define a broad range that you belong in, and then a narrower range, and then a narrower range, etc. What this basically does is unfairly "weight" the first few items of the test, because they are the ones that will determine what large band of scores you will be eligible for. Once the machine has pegged you at the lower half, say, there is no way for you to break out of that, because it's never going to give you those harder questions. If that's not where you belong, you won't be able to demonstrate that, and you'll just get the top score of that band. So if you start the thing out and you're nervous and you just make a dumb mistake, that mistake can really cost you--much more than it would later in the test. All these models are probabilistic, so guessing and just making dumb mistakes are accounted for. But the moment you go adaptive, the beauty of the model is trashed at the beginning and doesn't come into effect until later.
Many of the tests which moved to computer-adaptive methods have gone back to just serving a range of items, but one, the GRE, is still adaptive, even though ETS (the company that makes it and the SAT and the TOEFL) knows it doesn't work reliably (people taking the test over and over can get very different scores). Evidently there are financial/political reasons they can't get rid of it (rumor). And I have to take it again here in a few months to start applying for PhD programs. One of the drawbacks of researching psychometrics is that at some point you'll have to take one of these tests, knowing what the problems are.
So there you go. Yes, adding harder questions would indeed get you better discrimination among the top examinees, but at the cost of discrimination for the bulk of them. Ideally, you could just have the examinee come back and take the next-hardest test, but no one would go for that. Or perhaps the tests could be tiered, with linking items/anchoring, and the examinee could choose what level they wanted to take. I don't know of any major tests that do that, though, and having disjoint populations might cause a problem...
Anyway, there's more testing minutiae than you require.
Response favouring brevity: 163 words.
'cause I didn't edit and was backing up the position with anecdotal evidence.
short version:
125 words prevent answers containing lots of filler.
7 words
open source modern art: laser taggi
I am not saying to get rid of looking at test results to find the best ones, I am saying to use *some* measure of communication skills and personality to be able to find which ones are the best from the pick of the crop.
I would rather have a shut in engineer who does the math right vs an engineer with a hangover from last night going ehh ill just sign off on it.
I agree, but if I had two engineers who do the math right, I would rather have the one that gets along with the rest of the team and can add additional value to his/her colleagues than the shut in who sits and is grumpy and moody all the time.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
And now explain it to your middle-managers in a way that makes them comfortable with your decisions. Hint: staring at the floor, twitching, obsessively rubbing the food stain on the right side of your shirt, and stuttering are not helpful. No matter how much you'd like everyone to be a computer, they are not. Communication skills are important. Endless good ideas have been lost to the ages because the person who came up with them could not explain them, clearly, to the people who are actually in charge.
And what happens? Bridges collapse. People die of radiation poisoning. Rollercoasters fly off the rails. The fact that you must be articulate to be heard may in fact be a problem with the system, but some fault also lies with myopic techies who refuse to admit that there is any value outside of their figures. I'd rather have a single articulate engineer with a liberal arts background than a dozen shut-ins who get defensive when you ask them about their circuit board designs because OF COURSE IT ARE RIGHT YOU FOOL, I AM GENIUS!!!!.
And yes, I speak from experience...sigh.
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.
Depends on rater training, rating scales/rubrics, and the statistics used to account for multiple-rater situations (many facet Rasch model to the rescue here).
Whenever testing comes up on Slashdot, I lose my whole day to explaining how testing works, heheh.
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.
MIT wants to be recognized as one of the top schools in the nation. They don't want their graduates only to be calculating the force on a bearing or the radiation dose from an irradiated zinc sample. They want their graduates to be teaching others how to do those things, researching new ways of doing those kinds of things, and eventually writing grant proposals for new research. At least two of those require good communications skills in addition to strong mathematical ability. A 500 word essay is not a bad way of filtering out those who don't have both abilities.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if the current US climate towards immigration and foreigner visitors is resulting in a change in the pool of English-speaking foreign applicants. It could be that MIT just can't be as picky as they used to be. If so, that should be a major warning flag to anybody paying attention because it's more likely that that talent is going elsewhere rather than that the world as a whole suddenly got dumber.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Stanford asks a bunch of random little questions as well, but they also make you do the big essay. The little questions kind of annoyed me though, because a lot of them didn't really apply to me. Oh well, not like I wanted to go to Stanford anyway
All your base are belong to Wii.
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..
I agree, it seems that they really measure test taking ability rather than intelligence, and more specifically high school level test taking ability which is useless in college. But I guess it's some sort of differentiator, even if it's very flawed. If it didn't have to separate such a broad distribution of people, it might have been a better test.
All your base are belong to Wii.
They might respond skillfully, but not as skillfully as the guy who's BS'ing the essay. In other words, the applicant who responds more skillfully may actually be the person who won't succeed as a student...
Except for the technical tests, also submitted during the application, that actually measure technical aptitude and which others with your attitude are claiming should be sole arbiter? The guy who is BSing seems to be more creative, and therefore might actually be more successful as a researcher. However if you admit him, you'll also have to be more vigilant that he isn't getting his papers and test answers from the Internet.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Heh. I've know some engineering students for whom a 500-word essay is well-nigh impossible. How much more difficult do you want it to be?
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
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I don't like Linux. This doesn't make me a troll.
Increasing the level of difficulty of each facet of a test evenly so the test remains standardized is a very difficult task. They'll have to find the right kind of professors for the job, who probably won't want to do it.
I recommend the profs be compelled to write 500-word essays and those that write the best ones don't have to do work on the tests.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
Ah, the old "It's not what you know, but who you know" trick.
To the extent you're referring to the meaning behind the adage which roughly translates "personal connections count for more than talent does when it comes time to select for social/economic advancement" .... no, I don't mean that at all.
I mean knowing where and when to ask for help with a concept or a problem.
If you're a developer, you know the drill. You get stuck on a bug, and you can spend a few hours or even days pounding your head against the way. Or, after you've done basic personal diligence, you can poke your head over to the next cube, or IM a buddy, or find a good forum on the internet and save days.
If you're a student, you can certainly plug away by yourself on an assignment. But a student who uses faculty office hours, goes to the labs, and works with other students while doing their own basic diligent study is going to learn more with their time.
Who you know? Yeah. It makes a big difference. You should know who else is good at thinking about the kinds of problems you're working on, and you should get to know them well enough that you can collaborate with them sometimes.
Tweet, tweet.
That's idiotic, it's also why the US school system is in some ways better than that of many other countries. Tests and grades do not describe an individual. Standardized tests are at best a decent metric which means they're horrid at finding actual top students (too few of them and too much noise in such tests). Grades are near useless since high schools assign them very arbitrarily.
Top schools know such things. They know that one actual hard working genius is worth a hundred mediocre hard workers. They want to have a reputation for putting out the best and only putting out above average doesn't cut it.
For example, the valedictorian at my high school was far from the most hard working or the most intelligent student that year. He was simply a person who spent all his time doing perfectly in his average difficulty classes and tests. The truly intelligent and hard working students spent their time taking college level classes, actual courses at colleges, doing outside research and so on. That valedictorian will do well in college and afterwards but he won't be winning a nobel prize. One of the others might.
After reading these arguments about how important the essay is, why it shouldn't be, and how much potential it has to encourage a well-rounded student body, I would really like to hear from someone who has been on the receiving end. Out of 1000 essays written, how many get read? 10? Is it given a grade that gets weighted and merged with SAT scores, high school rankings, and handwriting analysis results for everyone; or is it used as a tie-breaker for the marginal cases?
My suspicion is that almost none of them get read, but they are still given a mystical importance by the applicants. It sounds like the admissions department is just trying to match the appearance to the practice, and saving a lot of headache all around.
By the end of my computer engineering degree I was writing well over a 1000 words a week, and at points closer to 3000, for various courseworks, reports, research assignments etc. We also had to make presentations, produce research posters as well as actually studying and developing our group project. 500 words is _nothing_ and that's from someone who hates having to write essays. In a lot of our written exams you'd write a 500 word essay on each answer easily.
We had guys that spoke pretty bad English, or who I guess had learnt it just to study in the UK, and they managed to get on with it. How is a 500 word essay such a big deal? Hell this comment is 183 words, it took me about 2 minutes to write. Iâ(TM)m pretty sure if I was applying for somewhere like MIT, which is a pretty prestigious institution and to which entry is no doubt competitive, Iâ(TM)d find time to write the next 317. In fact Iâ(TM)d probably write one twice as long and then cut out all the crap.
Indeed !
I've never understood what's so cool about grading-systems where a large portion of the clever students score identically, like the "A" to "F" system that is terribly popular, despite in many cases being used such that the best third of the students or somehting all get an A.
How do you use that for selecting the best 10% Or the best 5% of the students ? You can't, which nullifies one of the points of having grades at all.
The grades here are bell-curved, there's also only 6 grades, but the curve is such that the best 3% get top grade, the next 15% the second-best etc. The end-result is that everyone has something to stretch after because NOBODY has a top grade in everything, even having the top grade in half your subjects is exceedingly rare. (as in perhaps 1 student in 1000 manage it)
It's not like you're going for a liberal arts degree there - grades and standardized testing scores are what matter at MIT. What you wrote in an essay's hardly going to influence what you do in a technical environment like that.
Indeed: the ability to articulate ideas and express yourself clearly are wholly redundant in that environment. No one who does real work ever needs to be able to explain their findings. And of course MIT cares only about standardised grades! Why would a podunk place like that ever care about types of intelligence that are not easily measured by standardised tests?
</sarcasm> I am dumbfounded that there are actually people, in this forum of all places, who regard articulate use of language as a waste of time. OK, fine, the parent is capable of stringing together a sentence. But the simple fact is that many, if not most, school-leavers are not. I'm hoping the parent's post was sarcasm, but there aren't any signposts pointing to that. So I'm forced to conclude that the parent is simply living in an ivory tower where s/he never has to care about base things like communication.
How dare you! My mother was a saint!
that no one seems to have reposted, yet : I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row. I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru. Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello, I was scouted by the Mets, I am the subject of numerous documentaries. When I?m bored, I build large suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge. I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear. I don?t perspire. I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes. Last summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal-force demonstration. I bat .400. My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles.
Children trust me.
I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me. I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven.
I breed prizewinning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken with Elvis.
But I have not yet gone to college.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
How fucking sad is the American education system when a five hundred word essay is considered a major hurdle for admission into the best universities in the world? I'm a bit hammered right now and I could easily pull a fairly decent essay out of my ass far longer than five hundred words. Why should someone trying to get into university be held to a lower standard than a drunk high school dropout?
For someone who claims that shorter is better, your answer is 50% filler.
Contrast with: "Shorter = less crap.", 1 symbol, 3 words, vs your 1 number, 7 words.
Irony: Your original response in praise of brevity, and against the article (I believe you said "purple prose") was 163 words. Couldn't do it in 125 the first time?
Also, your claim:
Look, words are how we communicate - sometimes less is more, sometimes less is less. Just as sometimes a cigar is a phallic symbol, and sometimes it's just a smelly cancer-causing pacifier for insecure men.
But back to your point - that you believe that 125 words should be sufficient. You cannot tell every shaggy dog story in 125 words. You cannot explain every complex subject in 125 words. And sometimes, brevity would lose the essence.
For example, "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways ..." is a lot better than a simple "yes."
You might also want to consider the social advantages of not being quite so brief the next time a woman asks you "Does this dress make me look fat?" A simple "Yes" will condemn you. A "No", without any other words of reassurance, likewise is a major faux pas. Just as bad is that briefest of responses - silence. Too much of that, and you're going to hear those 4 words everyone dreads. No, not "Is it in yet?" - those OTHER 4 words - "We need to talk." Best be prepared to wax loquacious unless you like sleeping in the doghouse.
Could I have "dumbed it down" with fewer words? Sure - but it would not have conveyed the same nuances in the same fashion.
You put them out in the wilderness with no food and water. If they make it home alive, you take them both. If one eats the other to survive it's an epic fail ;-)
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
And continues to non-inform us of anything but her ability to fill space,
The sky over my home matches the grey in my eyes; the barbed wire fence around Lake Sequoyah is commemorated eternally by the disfiguration of my left hip.
It's not the best thing I've ever read, but at least she knows the difference between a semicolon and a comma.
the first thing we look at is the cover letter rather than their actual CV content. Once in an interview, sure, discussions about past experience and the like are valued, but just as valuable is the ability to communicate and to mesh into the current staff we have.
Typical HR error (yeah you're "not in HR")... you don't hire the best potential, you hire the best cover writer and most likable to HR person kind of person. This is why you people should never hire real talent. You wouldn't be able to identify it. Just like the University, it is not about the essay, it is about the potential to bullshit and work towards the greatest common denominator. In essence it is about the ability to corrupt oneself for the organization you're applying to. If you want excellent people, it is exactly not the way to get them. They are not your bitch. This will get you average people.
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?
Except these essays aren't being graded on proper punctuation, form, and literary flow. I think it's important to give an applicant an outlet to express why it is that they want to attend the school.
how are you going to: communicate your idea to possible investors? Come up with a decent business plan? Raise the funding to turn this idea into a successful enterprise? Find and properly motivate employees?
Find someone who CAN do that, and have them do so, for a cut of the result.
Different people are good at different things. Why is communication so highly valued in areas where it is not essential?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
why the hell do you try break down any assay are lieing and bullshit? communication ability is THE number one factor that seperates the successful from the could have been.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
There may be a point of removing the essay, but what will they replace with?
Ten years ago, when I seeked for university admission in Korea, a country which has extremely competitive university admission procedures, we had essay exams. They give you approximately 500~1000 words of whatever text (it can be some literature, news article, textbook text, or whatsoever), followed by a short question which has to be answered in a 1,600 character (around 500 wordsessay. With something like 2 hours time limit.
With only two hours, students had only something like 10 minutes to read the text, 5 minutes to think, 10 minutes to plan the structure of the essay, and about an hour to write 500 words on a piece of paper, including making correceionts. In other words, if you cannot understand the text and figure out what to write within 20 or so minutes, you are doomed.
Back then, and for many more years, I thought it was unfair. I wanted to do engineering, but the essay looked ridiculous. However, after ten years, I found that preparing for the essay exam had greatly enhanced my writing skills (which I find really important - sometimes more important than math or physics), and it forced me to read a lot of books of all sorts of topics.
I think these kind of essay exams (with tight time limits) may help, but unlike Korea, United States is a fairly large country, and it may be too difficult to have all the students seeking admision in one place.
I like.
If the scores are all the same, then it really doesn't matter who gets in. 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.
Not necessarily. 500 words is actually very little. If you want to get a couple of points across in 500 words, it forces you to write clearly and concisely - and having seen some of the dross written by supposedly educated people, "ability to write clearly and concisely" is definitely something to be encouraged.
Find someone who CAN do that, and have them do so, for a cut of the result.
Different people are good at different things. Why is communication so highly valued in areas where it is not essential?
Probably because in order to get your team to do what you want them to do (rather than a poorly-conceived misunderstanding of what you want them to do) requires communication.
At a public (state-funded, meaning you pay only a medium-sized crapload of money, rather than a large one) university, it's pretty hard. At best, you'll have no better chance than any other out-of-state student. The standards of admission for in-stats are usually MUCH lower than for out-of-state (at public schools). Note that this doesn't mean it's not possible at all, though; I attend the University of Washington in Seattle, and there are a reasonable handful of international students.
For a private school, it shouldn't be any harder at all (admissions-wise). In fact, you may get a small advantage, since most universities value diversity (I had no idea how homogenous the US populace was until I spent a few years travelling). Many (though certainly not all) of the best American universities are private, and their admissions standards are accordingly strict, but being from another country shouldn't count against you in any way.
All this is assuming you actually get to the point of an admissions decision, of course. There's a handful of standardized tests that are used (for graduate school, you need the GREs, which are probably available if you do a little research), plus things like your transcripts from previous schools and so forth. At grad school, recommendations are also apparently a big deal (it's a topic I'm currently looking into but haven't really experienced first-hand yet) so it would probably help a lot to have professors with American colleagues who could write you a really good recommendation for the programs those colleagues work in.
Having interned at Microsoft, I can assure you that there are LOTS of international students in CS programs, especially at the graduate level. I'd estimate that perhaps 10% of the interns were international students.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
How about Isaac Newton? Neurotic, no communications skills, died a virgin.
Paul Erdos? Maybe the greatest mathematician ever but no life skills at all.
etc.
Which is great for them. Really, it is.
But let's be honest, if you're reading this you are not the next Isaac Newton. And you never will be.
That kind of ability comes about a couple of times in a generation. If you (or anyone) is going to be part of some fantastic discovery which will change the world, the immense likelihood is that you'll be making that discovery as part of a team effort. Which requires communication.
If the scores are all the same, then it really doesn't matter who gets in. 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. That said, a first come, first served system would be appropriate when determine who gets accepted when scores are identical.
An essay is a good way to distinguish between a group with similar test scores and grades. Grades and test scores are merely an indicator of ability to do the academic work; table stakes if you will. An essay lets you learn a little something about the person, and how they think; not that they can think.
The author referred to the UofC's essays - an interesting set that lets the applicant show who they are; the UofC's questions also reflect the somewhat wacky nature of the school. I've read admission's essays; many are rehashes of the same sterile story line; a few engage you and make you think. The latter are the ones that get admitted. As a side note, a few tend to forget to do a find and replace of some other college's name - those go in the "Thanks for playing; we have no lovely parting gifts for you."
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
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
Making up 500 words of bullshit is actually a quite important skill to have in any job.
To paraphrase Scott Adams; "You don't want someone to design a nuclear power plant which just looks like it'll keep the radiation in".
Squirrel!
The alternative is hiring competent middle managers that doesn't judge ideas based on presentation?
I know it is unlikely by we can all dream can't we?
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.
What, the Isaac Newton who was a closet alchemist and member of secret societies and was also one of the first true scientists ? That Isaac Newton ? The member of Parliament, the fellow and then President of the Royal Society who gained a knighthood and was buried with great ritual and tradition in Westminster Abbey ? The guy who was seen as the greatest natural philosopher in Europe of his time, in his time ? That Isaac Newton ?
No life skills there at all.
dick.
So MIT is not looking for highly skilled technicians but for highly skilled entrepreneurs. Perhaps it should then be renamed to MIE, i.e. Massachusetts Institute of Entrepreneurship.
Communication skills are overrated. Those people that are willing to listen always get the message. It's only when people are too deeply entrenched in their own way of thinking that communication skills are really valuable. Most ideas are simple anyway and if well understood, then they can be easily transmitted.
Since when did the things you enumerated have anything to do with being able to write a coherent essay?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The alternative is hiring competent middle managers that doesn't judge ideas based on presentation?
I think this has been tried already but they were all fired the next week by the upper level of management who couldn't stand their smugness.
Remember to tighten your ties, the more starved for oxygen your brain cells are, the easier it is to deal with corporate culture.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Yeesh. I just wrote an essay for my English class (a mock college application essay) in maybe 20 minutes. It came out to around 620 words, less than two pages. Personally, I believe writing skills are very important and that the college application process should be even more personalized than it is. This just sounds like the MIT applications office is getting tired of reading essays...
I went to MIT during the same time period. I wrote well when I arrived, so guess what? I wrote well when I left. The Humanities courses were a total waste of time for me. Thirty years on, I can't recall a single inspiring thought or insight that was transmitted to me by the unhappy and unpleasant faculty in the MIT Humanities Department.
You may have been some kind of weird-ass nerd genius ("the technical stuff was easy"), but please don't assume that everyone else requires two years of remedial training in order to become a human being. We don't.
Edges? In the plural?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You're presuming that they want to nurture your potential and help you be all you can be. You're failing to look at things from their perspective, or from the perspective of your employer. You need to understand that they look at you the same way they look at a hammer. You are a tool. You are not the only tool, or the special tool. All the tools there are needed to get the job done, or they would be standing on the unemployment line.
Trivialities, lies and bullshit are the grease that allows all the parts to work in a single-minded fashion together towards an arbitrary goal rather than flying apart due to friction between people who disagree about the issues. If you can't work that way, you're useless as a tool, and therefore get to stand on the unemployment line.
It's pretty cut and dried. It stems from the concept of private property. Property laws are the foundation that gives legitimacy to your disenfranchisement. If that foundation did not exist, there would be no method by which to exclude your involvement. That would shift the focus of our attention. Instead of attempting to address the needs of arbitrary goals that come from owners of property, we would become more driven by real issues. In an issue driven world that doesn't disenfranchise people, there is substantial motive to recognize and nurture potential and help people be all they can be. Even if the best you can be is well enough informed to recognize a good advisor when you see one.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
If you were trying to demonstrate that you are a facetious twat, then your answer was fine. If however, you were trying to demonstrate your knowledge both of the subject and the interlinked conditions surrounding it, you failed miserably. No-one engineers in a vacuum. The product of your mental labour is usually destined to end up in use in the real world, so having some concept of the issues surrounding the environment where your work will end up is quite essential.
With the tightrope example, you can dismiss the obvious answer (the tightrope) simply because it is obvious. You could dismiss it humorously but get it out of the way. A more interesting approach would broach the subject of the safety net, and draw a correlation between that and a real world situation where your design may be used in a situation where a "safety net" may not be possible. How would you ensure that, in the unlikely event of your design failing, a situation didn't develop that could cause injury or loss of life ? How would you mitigate the risks ? Simply being aware that what you do has consequences further down the line demonstrates a greater understanding of your role. You could have discussed the potential for failure engendered by relying on another teams work to fix the two ends of the tightrope. In the real world you are very rarely responsible for the whole project, so an understanding of the problems and parameters regarding other peoples work is quite a valuable skill. To provide the requisite car analogy, you can be the best driver on the planet, but you still have to be aware of and take account of other drivers actions. A willingness to go beyond your core subject in order to improve the real world application of that subject is a desirable trait, not something to be laughed off or treated with derision.
That you did treat the subject with derision and blew it off by doing as little as possible (in a school-yard level immature manner), shows that not only are you not prepared to take on board serious contemplation of a subject, but also that you are self centred and wilfully ignorant. Not especially endearing qualities in somebody who could potentially be in a position that gives control over other peoples lives. You are obviously not taking your application seriously, so why should the examiner ? And your dig at grammar nazis at the end shows the contempt you have for people who do actually care about the accuracy of what they read and write. Not a team player. You are probably going to spend most of your working life producing brilliant designs that take no account of where they will be used or by whom.
To sum up, you are wilfully ignorant, lazy, contemptuous of others, inaccurate and unimaginative. Sorry we have no place to offer you here. Try again when you're older than 13, or retake a few classes.
(500)
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.
Good writing is not merely words, it is also structure. Your supposedly improved essay demonstrates this principle admirably.
Google for peopleware. You are getting the tools all right. Thank you for your, cough, lessons.
Communication skills are overrated. Those people that are willing to listen always get the message. It's only when people are too deeply entrenched in their own way of thinking that communication skills are really valuable. Most ideas are simple anyway and if well understood, then they can be easily transmitted.
Oh boy.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you're either relatively young (probably not much older than 25), you've been fantastically lucky or both.
The world (particularly where specialist knowledge is concerned) is absolutely chock-full of people who have the knowledge down to a fine art and can apply it all day every day beautifully.
The number of people who truly understand it and are able to communicate it in clear, layman's terms is drastically lower.
I find a certain delicious irony in noting that you were able to explain your point of view beautifully. To me, this suggests that you're not the kind of person that would find communication to be a big problem in the first place.
wish I hadn't commented now, that deserves to be modded to the sky and back.
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.
Look at the details of the Challenger disaster, and then try telling us that engineering is all about getting the facts right and that effective communication doesn't matter. In fact, it's a common factor in a lot of disasters -- engineers identified the problem in advance but failed to convince the descision makers.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
An essay is a shitty way to select engineering students
No it isn't. Engineers have to communicate with each other, whoever will build their stuff, and whoever will use it or explain to the users how to use it, and to their bosses on why their work is valuable.
In my own experience writing software, I've seen really smart developers be almost useless on a project because they couldn't explain or communicate their work (forcing others to spend longer understanding or redeveloping), and merely competent developers (such as myself) really thrive because we could get good information from users and other areas of the business about what they needed and could explain what we were doing in layman's terms.
You might like the idea of engineering being a profession where you don't have to deal with people, but it simply isn't true.
I am officially gone from
I'll take a brilliant engineer who knows how to communicate difficult concepts (such as "why I should get into MIT instead of some other valedictorian") over a brilliant engineer who does not know how to communicate every time.
So will employers of brilliant engineers, by the way.
And remember, MIT isn't only looking for who's the smartest, but who's going to make it to graduation without a) killing himself, b) killing one or more of his classmates, c) killing a member of the faculty or staff.
I say keep the essay.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
I think you'll find that the better universities won't be completely persuaded by a "this is is incredibly important but it's hard to do so we won't bother" argument.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
So you end up with the best bullshitters winning.
Welcome to real life.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
I've certainly watched presentations by Nobel laureates which were poor in comparison to those by typical scientists, which themselves are often not so clear and polished.
And yet, despite not being as good at communication and convincing people as a salesman or businessman, they still do their job as scientists a lot better than the businessman could do it.
While some communication skills are undoubtedly necessary, demanding that all technical people be excellent at it means you'll reject a lot of perfectly good people. For a scientific or engineering job, "good enough" presentation skills can usually be learned, good enough technical skills rather less so. For management, the reverse may be true, but we're not talking about that.
What I got from the essay?... apparently MIT isn't rejecting people based on their narcissistic views of their own preciousness.
God, that was horrible.
Don't get me wrong - I agree with her in principle that it's NOT excessive to ask 18-yr-olds to express themselves cogently in a 500 word essay. I think that's a good hurdle for top schools.
But her essay wasn't a good example, it was drivel. Self-obsessive, whiny, emo drivel.
-Styopa
It would be very tiresome for all the people clustered at the mean to deal with a test that was reasonably able to distinguish between folks that are 3 and 4 standard deviations out.
An automatically scaling computer test could probably do it without being a huge pain, but the results of the SAT aren't used in a way that particularly justifies developing such a thing (people scoring over 1500 (or maybe some lower number...) are going to do very well at the great majority of schools, which happens to be the market the SAT is aimed at).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
too verbose.
(2)
Newton was a very shrewd politician and an effective communicator. He also didn't focus all of his energies on science -- he did a lot of very strange work on the occult that his hagiographers tend to gloss over.
Erdos was lucky enough to have a lot of friends who were able to look after him. I agree that the GP was optimistic in suggesting that it would be hard to find one great scientist -- I immediately thought of Erdos too. But one fluke is not a good basis for a complete admissions policy.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
"the Big Essay"? A 500 word essay can hardly be labeled "Big", "Long" or anything implying a large size. 2000-5000 word essays are big, but a 500 word text blurb is just not worthy of the name essay in my book. Cutting that down to 250 words just make for a headline with some fuzz underneath.
The student who wrote the piece in the Times did have a point there, although she was using quite a bit of melodramatic wind-baggery when she wrote:
Now, please don't get me wrong, I'm not attempting to fault the short essay in any way, but its position is not in danger here. I have heard little convincing criticism against the long essay, and while high praise has been heaped upon its shorter counterpart, there was a short essay in there before! In classic MIT fashion, we are wiping out the quality and diversity of information in exchange for a consistent data set and higher word count. I feel it is my duty as a lover of the written word to defend the merit of lengthy writing before the long essay goes the way of mailing letters and classical literature.
Not really - if you have something interesting to say, that is.
I'm sure that a post in slashdot isn't going to make them change their policy. Since MIT has now removed the 500 word essay, it seems that it might not be a good way to measure the "drive, ambition, etc.". It seems to me that such an essay helps just as little in determining these important attributes as the xkcd capcha in differentiating humans and computers. With a little help anyone can write 500 words of bullshit like the "great" essay in the article.
I think the most important argument against the use of subjective measurements like these is that they can be used to pervert the selection system.
Here's my sample essay (in 33 words):
My dad is the CEO of Big Corp and is willing to donate millions to the university I'll be attending. So you see that I'm a very good candidate for MIT.
I agree that skills other than pure math are important for success in a top engineering school; test for those, but don't put people ahead of others because the say they're motivated.
She could have written "I'm aware of the world outside my chosen field, capable of ignoring rules and aware of consequences".
Shorter and more to the point.
Being able to "make up 500 words of bullshit" is an important skill that's incredibly lacking out there. As an engineer, you need to know how to write.
The purpose of the essay is primarily to determine the students' ability to write rather than to find anything out about them personally, so it makes sense that sometimes the B.S. essay is the better one.
That said, most teachers are pretty good at detecting B.S., and a student who manages to write a good paper which isn't full of B.S. is going to come across very well too. I'm not saying the system doesn't create a strong incentive to write B.S., but I think you might be missing the point of the essay assignment.
They have to reject a lot of perfectly good people anyway (what's the application rate? 10 applicants for each place?) If you have to reject 90% of the candidates anyway, you need to find a valid way of choosing the 10% you have room to accept. When undoubtedly most of the applicants will be sound on engineering type things, it seems perfectly acceptable to accept the technically sound AND able to communicate applicants in preference to the others.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
That explains why the state government that I work for is so screwed up. Too many bad PowerPoint presentations.
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.
Middle managers only exist to facilitate communication between technical specialist workers and policy generalist upper management. If you can't manage to do that, blaming your subordinates will probably not get you very far.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
'You can write something meaningful in 250 words, but it takes a lot more skill than doing it in 500 words. Every word has to count for so much more.'
I think this guy was going for 250, but ran over by 13:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Gettysburg_Address
Fail!
Lucky it wasn't something important, like an MIT application.
You know David Patterson can't read any of that, right?
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
Since MIT has now removed the 500 word essay, it seems that it might not be a good way to measure the "drive, ambition, etc.".
I think it's more likely to be because they want to avoid lawsuits.
With a little help anyone can write 500 words of bullshit like the "great" essay in the article.
No they can't. Believe me, they can't. I have to deal with countless engineers who can't string a coherent sentence together. The essay in the article showed a creative approach to the question. The author will almost certainly be a more effective communicator of engineering (and a better advocate for MIT) than somebody who produces a bland essay.
I think the most important argument against the use of subjective measurements like these is that they can be used to pervert the selection system.
Here's my sample essay (in 33 words): My dad is the CEO of Big Corp and is willing to donate millions to the university I'll be attending. So you see that I'm a very good candidate for MIT.
Arguably, that's precisely the information that the university wants! :-)
The trouble with objective systems is that all the objectivity in the world is precisely no use whatsoever if you are objectively measuring the wrong thing. University entrance tests are necessarily indirect measures; you can't directly measure at that stage how well somebody will do on the course, how much of a mark they will make in their subsequent career, what they will do for the reputation and finances of the university. They are the things that should be objectively measured. If subjective assessments of the candidates are better predictors of those factors than objective assessments, then the university should be making subjective assessments. Subjectivity can be objectively better, but those who major in the sciences and engineering can have difficulty seeing that. The quasi-religious dogma of objectivity has led to countless cases of deterioration in performance (look at the gaming of hospital waiting lists in the UK for example).
I agree that skills other than pure math are important for success in a top engineering school; test for those, but don't put people ahead of others because the say they're motivated.
I don't think that just saying they're motivated would have got them far in the MIT essay test. They had to show actual skill in essay writing.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
It's not as if there are heaps of these students.
Six and a half billion people on the planet. Even at the top end of the curve that's still more than they can accept each year.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
I must have been really bad in an past life :(
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
Anyone who doesn't already have at least a couple of essays of roughly that length that they did for school assignments floating around on their hard drive probably doesn't belong at MIT anyway. When I applied to colleges that required essays, I just freshened up one of my old ones and sent it in...and that was back in '85 when we used floppies.
She could have written "I'm aware of the world outside my chosen field, capable of ignoring rules and aware of consequences".
Shorter and more to the point.
Actually, it's very nearly the same length. The original poster was claiming that the whole sentence was empty and should have been left out, and yet you're re-stating it in a minimal way (that doesn't indicate any communications skills at all beyond the ability to write technical documentation, a third purpose of the sentence) that's still around 5% of the total length of the essay requirement.
Interesting how a sentence that struck one reader as pointless turns out to be so important when you sit down and think about it in-context.
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".
Translation: Students no longer know how to write. I'm just waiting for schools to start requiring students to text or tweet as part of the application process.
Ever see the slides the Thiokol engineers presented to show the risk of launching Challenger in cold weather? They did a poor job conveying their point. Even with the benefit of hindsight and knowing what to look for, it's hard to see what they were saying. I think that's the sort of thing Alamais is talking about.
I've never found communication to be the issue there. There's plenty of times when I inform my boss that releasing the product in its current (prototype) state could be disastrous and he calmly and rationally explains that they will release it anyways and hope for the best because of business pressures. Of course, the fact of the matter is that with a bit of scrambling 70-80% of the time our team makes it work well enough that I wouldn't call the rollout a disaster. My point is, communication doesn't matter in the face of demands coming in from the muckety mucks.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
"Communication is the process of transferring information from one entity to another" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication).
One way communication is an important and valuable form of communication. There are other forms, and they are equally important, but that doesn't mean there is no value in essays.
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.
I am sure that if your application essay was ranting or overly "expressing" that would not get you accepted. Just like in any other situation in life - if you meet with your boss and start rambling incoherently you are not going to be the one who gets the promotion. You can call that "thought crime" if you want. I call it life.
With a little help anyone can write 500 words of bullshit like the "great" essay in the article.
No they can't. Believe me, they can't. I have to deal with countless engineers who can't string a coherent sentence together. The essay in the article showed a creative approach to the question. The author will almost certainly be a more effective communicator of engineering (and a better advocate for MIT) than somebody who produces a bland essay.
With alot of help then :) Personally, I found the essay to be the kind of pseudo-creative look-at-me-I'm-talented type of writing that shouldn't be encouraged for an engineering school. I don't blame the writer, she did what was needed to get in and did it quite well.
Subjectivity can be objectively better, but those who major in the sciences and engineering can have difficulty seeing that. The quasi-religious dogma of objectivity has led to countless cases of deterioration in performance (look at the gaming of hospital waiting lists in the UK for example).
Thinking too much like an engineer - you got me. The problem with many subjective measurements is that they can be gamed as well: the only reason someone would describe themselves like in the essay in the article is to appear smart, driven and ambitious; in essence gaming the system. The simpler the indirect measurements are, the harder they are to subvert.
I don't think that just saying they're motivated would have got them far in the MIT essay test. They had to show actual skill in essay writing.
I'm sure they have to show actual skill in essay writing, but is that really the way to measure communication skills in a would-be engineer? I don't think so. The biggest problem from the fairness pov is that these essays can be written with outside help. Maybe have them read an article on an engineering topic on site and summarize the main points. Or have them write a short paper like the ones actually done during the studies.
This is exactly how Purdue does it. When I applied it was a single page application, that was it, no essays, no extra bullshit. If your scores showed you had the potential to succeed in the field you were interested in, you got in as long as there was room. They did early acceptance in September, which meant I got to sit around in senior high school english and sleep since that class was focused on writing your college entrance essays.
the only reason someone would describe themselves like in the essay in the article is to appear smart, driven and ambitious; in essence gaming the system. The simpler the indirect measurements are, the harder they are to subvert.
Yes, that's the reason for doing it. What's important is the ability to do it.
I don't think so. The biggest problem from the fairness pov is that these essays can be written with outside help.
Yes, that is an issue. It will continue to be an issue with coursework throughout their academic life, so maybe it is a fair test?
Maybe have them read an article on an engineering topic on site and summarize the main points. Or have them write a short paper like the ones actually done during the studies.
I think it's important to show the ability to communicate with non-engineers, because in engineering how well we do that is going to be a major factor in our success. I think expecting somebody to show ability to communicate with non-engineers on technical matters would be setting the bar too high. That usually takes years -- decades -- of experience post-university!
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
In such a scenario which is more useful, the ability to write a good essay in English or good knowledge of mathematics?
Essay = moderate length written piece including an introduction, a descriptive example of the subject, conclusions drawn, summary.
Cliff notes != essay.
"Honestly. She's not that good."
/. or MIT that has to be bad.
I know, I just found her photo:
http://clarebayley.com/?page_id=15
http://graphics.fansonly.com/photos/schools/mit/sports/w-crewop/auto_headshot/683289.jpeg
http://www.eecs.mit.edu/spotlights/images/google-android-enlarged_Coveney.jpg (not the little Asian girl unfortunately)
I can see why she sticks to pen and paper instead of video blogs. Even for
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Endowment.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
You have to start at a Tavern!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Actually part of the reason for NASA's problems is that they politicized their risk calculations to show that the Shuttle was several orders of magnitude safer than the data actually indicated.
They also had pressure from the Reagan Administration to keep on schedule.
The communication skills of the engineers were not a factor in these causes. Also note that if there had not been public hearings we would most likely never learned what the real problems were. If the engineers concerns had been aired in public before the flight, it is likely that the launch wouldn't have taken place.
Communication skills in engineers can be important, but it wasn't a factor in the Challenger disaster.
Their ability to make up 500 words of bullshit is a perfect gauge as to the students future capabilities in the work force.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
the only reason someone would describe themselves like in the essay in the article is to appear smart, driven and ambitious; in essence gaming the system. The simpler the indirect measurements are, the harder they are to subvert.
Yes, that's the reason for doing it. What's important is the ability to do it.
The ability to communicate is important, sure, but is writing a fancy, bogus essay about how motivated you are really the best way to measure it?
I think it's important to show the ability to communicate with non-engineers, because in engineering how well we do that is going to be a major factor in our success. I think expecting somebody to show ability to communicate with non-engineers on technical matters would be setting the bar too high.
So writing about technical matters is too hard, so we should have the students write about their feelings and ambitions instead?
That usually takes years -- decades -- of experience post-university!
Obviously you wouldn't expect them to do it as well as a seasoned veteran, but being able to quickly learn about a technical matter and explain it in a clear, concise matter to someone without prior knowledge of the subject is exactly the kind of communication they are be expected to perform during the studies.
Why is there this implicit assumption that it is the engineers that lack the communication skills and not the decision makers?
Further, it is well understood that managers are more sensitive to political pressure than engineers and thus have a tendency to be biased against an unpopular decision.
This communication defense just smells like an excuse to blame the Indians and spare the Chiefs.
The ability to communicate is important, sure, but is writing a fancy, bogus essay about how motivated you are really the best way to measure it?
Writing a bogus essay should get them failed.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Hitler: Didn't they read the part of my essay where I say that I will BOMB THEM IF I DON'T GET IN?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
While this is not a problem at MIT quite yet, the ratio of women to men in college was about 1.3 to 1 in 2006. That's about 56% female. In 2007 it was 58% female.
I'm having a hard time finding 2008 or 2009 data, but the trend shows no sign of reversing so far.
Thus if you're applying to college _right now_, being male is actually not that bad, especially once you get out of the top-tier schools. (And even in the top tier, Harvard is more than 50% female in its most recent entering classes; MIT in 2008-2009 had 1,885 female undergrads [http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/life/women_at_mit/index.shtml] out of a total population of 4,153 [http://web.mit.edu/facts/enrollment.html]. That's 45% female.)
You're a jackass. You always have something to learn from everyone.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
You would assign tasks like these to only one engineer? Sounds dangerous. I would always assign such tasks to a team of engineers and specialists (eg. stress analyst) - which wouldn't include a shut in engineer.
On-campus interviews! If one can bullshit those, then I owuld think the peson is savvy enough to get into any decent school.
I've never understood this extreme method of thinking when it comes to communication skills. Just because someone isn't a professional essay writer doesn't mean they are incapable of expressing themselves. I could quite easily write a 500 word essay with very little effort. All that's required is a basic understanding of the language in which you're writing. In fact, I did write a 500 word essay for one of the standardized tests I took before starting college. I wrote it in about 20 minutes by hand and turned it in. Oddly, my score in writing was my highest of the bunch measured, one point ahead of math.
This is the same amount of effort I would have expended on an essay if my college had required one as part of the application process, with the possible exception that it would be typed instead of hand written. I'm currently sitting on a 4.0 GPA and I still consider essays on arbitrary topics to be useless.
This I can agree with. I think there would have to be something mentally deficient about a person to be unable to write a 500 word essay.
You're a jackass. You always have something to learn from everyone.
No, I WAS a jackass. My point here is a.) that universities encouraged that kind of attitude by offering me huge scholarships, and b.) aiming low at a critical point (such as where to get your BS) can completely prevent you from living up to your potential. By the time I realized that school (even the crappy littl state school where I ended up going) had something to offer, I had my piece of paper, my scholarship was over, and it was too late to learn anything.
Lies. Lies. Lies. Lies. Lies.
The space shuttle Challenger exploded, killing its crew, not because engineers had failed to communicate the dangers, but in spite of their warnings. NASA management simply refused to listen to what the engineers were telling them. Read Feynman's lucid assesment of exactly what went wrong at NASA. Here's a relevant excerpt
And this report is coming from a scientist.
Modern managers and executive peddle in lies, exaggeration and general bullshit. It is the hallmark of their profession. Engineers and scientists by contrast deal in precisely the opposite commodity; they seek the truth. Assessments like the MIT application essay allow bullshitters to shine bright under the floodlights of meaningless prose, while shunning the real technical ability and merit of people who actually understand and can do things.
If there were less such opportunities for charlatans to shine, and more testing of real skills, there would be a lot less Challenger disasters and accidents like them.
May the Maths Be with you!
I haven't gone to college, but when I do, I'll drink Dos Equis.
Stay thirsty my friends.
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An essay is a shitty way to select engineering students
A lack of an essay is an even shittier way of selecting engineering students. An engineer who can communicate is incalculably more useful than one who can't. Engineers must be able to interact with others--no man is an island, especially in today's interconnected world. When I'm interviewing candidates, ones who cannot write are among the first eliminated from consideration. Want to get hired? Know how to write, regardless of your profession.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
Any discipline needs to be able to communicate across disciplines. Engineers are quick (and right) to lampoon communications from magagement that are full of obscure and apparently meaningless management-speak. Well, guess what? It works both ways, and the managers (rightly) despise communications from engineers that are full of obscure and apparently meaningless tech-speak. It isn't the responsibility of managers to become engineers in order to understand engineers. It's the responsibility of all concerned to communicate effectively. Each side tends to fail in its own way. Engineers tend to think that they don't need to communicate effectively when they do (see a lot of posts in this thread). Managers tend to think that they are comminicating effectively when they're not.
But ultimately, the decision-makers make the decisions, and if the decision is whether or not you get a paycheck then you have to play by their rules, whether you like it or not.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
I agree that the GP was optimistic in suggesting that it would be hard to find one great scientist -- I immediately thought of Erdos too.
In my defense, I said nothing about mathematicians, and the omission was intentional. Outside a very narrow range of fields like mathematics, where everything you need to know to understand a problem can be precisely defined, real greatness requires mental versatility.
Setting aside geniuses, I would argue more generally that this sort of versatility is often (though not always) found in the most successful people in any field.
As someone with Asperger's Syndrome, I'd like to point out that the engineers you speak of may be unable to learn the people skills you say are required. Should they still be allowed to be productive members of society? Be careful who you exclude. You may be excluding someone important.
Having said that, I recognize that people skills are important. I work on mine every day of my life.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
So what good exactly is the "descriptive and alliterative treatment" vs. technical documentation? To me, the former is something I have to translate into the latter before I can read it. I can appreciate that someone might enjoy creative word choice, but is it anything more than a puzzle?
As someone who has been involved with admissions (although not with MIT, but a similar school) I'll have to say that this is one of the unspoken critera. Basically private schools (like MIT) want successful alumni.
The first step is to admit people that are likely to matriculate. You'd be surprised how many applications come to selective colleges which look like "trophy-admits" or "back-up school application" (basically people who apply, but have no intention of ever going there). For a school like MIT, I'm sure they get students that also apply to Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, and Caltech. Say the student lives in Palo Alto and three generations of their family attended Stanford. I'm sure MIT looks pretty suspiciously at this type of application. This doesn't take a 500 word essay to figure out, maybe an interview with a local alum is all that is needed here.
The second step is to get people that aren't likely to flame out. Standardized testing and teacher recommendations are good for this.
Next is to get people that will likely value their university education in the future (enough to at least spread the good word and/or donate money). Teacher recommendations help a lot here to see if a student shows actual interest in something that university might offer. Maybe a interview might help here too.
Later on it's good to get people that will be successful enough to improve the reputation of the school. Schools with good reputations can attract better researchers and grant money which is the ultimate goal. This is basically a crap shoot. But sadly one predictor of success is whether one or both parents attended what level of college and if were at least mildly successful.
When doing admissions work, believe it or not, often people crunch numbers. If a school thought it could do well enough by picking people at random, I'm sure they might try it. Some things correlate, some things don't.
If you haven't applied to college lately (because you are an old fart like me), you might be amused to know that many colleges outsource their admission information collections process.
https://www.commonapp.org/CommonApp/default.aspx
Although MIT isn't among the schools that use this (and just fyi, commonapp isn't just the rinky-dink colleges, Harvard, Stanford, Caltech, and Princeton all use this). I guess that MIT thinks that they can cut down on the problem with the first step (too many "trophy-admit" applications), with this strategy. Who knows...
In any case, if you take a look at the common "supplements" in the commonapp site (selective colleges generally have supplements), you can see that almost everyone has the short-form essay or quick question answer format rather than a traditional long-form essay.
I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing that MIT has similar issues with the essays and interviews that my alma-mater had when they reviewed the process. Professors and admissions staff that read the essays or give interviews had a great variance in evaluating these (some readers/interviewers are consistenly too hard, or too picky, or too biased) and averaging and accounting for these variances is really hard and time consuming. Making the admissions input process shorter and more structured allows more eyeballs on each application which usually leads to better outcomes for both sides (e.g., better matches).
One way communication is an important and valuable form of communication.
How can you know that, unless it is two-way? With one way communication all you get is "undeniable opinions".
Sure... you might get a grade in return, but you don't get to revise your essay, or argue its value. The grade you get is just another one-way "undeniable opinion".
Unless there is dialog, communication is worthless - as far as communicating goes. Sure.. it may be a nice story, but the writer and the reader are NOT communicating.
I am sure that if your application essay was ranting or overly "expressing" that would not get you accepted. Just like in any other situation in life - if you meet with your boss and start rambling incoherently you are not going to be the one who gets the promotion. You can call that "thought crime" if you want. I call it life.
Ta-DAH!
And that is the point. There is NO communication in the essay. One shot and that's it.
In real-life you wouldn't get to rant-out incoherently. You would be asked to explain your behavior most likely more than once.
And as you have put it - you might not get the promotion.
NOT get banned from practicing the profession - which is what using a 500 word essay as a determining criteria for getting into the university of your choosing effectively is.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
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?
----------
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!
----
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.
----
Alternative TLDR version: Admissions essays suck.
Please learn to read in context ... the context was "leaders of tomorrow." What do many of the leaders of today have in common? The very things I enumerated.
So if the essay is supposed to help select the leaders of tomorrow (as the poster further up in the thread posited), it should, based on current practice, select for amoral drunken thieving lying coke-heads and other scoundrels.
For a private school, it shouldn't be any harder at all (admissions-wise). In fact, you may get a small advantage, since most universities value diversity (I had no idea how homogenous the US populace was until I spent a few years travelling). Many (though certainly not all) of the best American universities are private, and their admissions standards are accordingly strict, but being from another country shouldn't count against you in any way.
What? Compared to what country is the US population homogenous? Japan? Sweden? Botswana?
Are you sure the last time you visited wasn't in the 1960s?
Actually, it's very nearly the same length. The original poster was claiming that the whole sentence was empty and should have been left out, and yet you're re-stating it in a minimal way (that doesn't indicate any communications skills at all beyond the ability to write technical documentation, a third purpose of the sentence) that's still around 5% of the total length of the essay requirement.
Interesting how a sentence that struck one reader as pointless turns out to be so important when you sit down and think about it in-context.
Yeah, she has said something. But it is redundant to state it in eight colorfully different ways. Every sentence in her essay is screaming "I'm aware of the world outside my chosen field, capable of ignoring rules and aware of consequences", yet not every sentence is necessary to convey this. To quote another in this thread, she could've written,
while dead_horse:
beat()
My page.
In response to the question 'Why would you like to attend North Carolina State University?', I wrote the following very candid and succinct list:
1. It's close.
2. It's cheap.
3. I can get in.
Approximately four years later, I had a BS in Aerospace Engineering.
A few short counter-examples to prove you really don't get it:
People are usually mistaken about what is "obvious", the truthfulness of it, as well as to whether it's actually all that obvious to others:
When diagnosing a problem, do you check the obvious? It's funny to hear how production was shut down for several hours because they called an electrician to "fix" the machine - and all he had to do was turn the big yellow knob from "Off" to "On" (last month).
Or people who - TWICE - have their car towed to replace a supposedly defective fuel pump - and both times it turns out they were just out of gas. (There's a reason why we call him "Bubba").
Or to be called upon to drive 1400km because the software I wrote prints fine on the mainframe, but not on the local computer and the VPs are going to be looking at it at 10 am so PLEASE come and fix it ... and the printer isn't plugged into the pc. (And this is AFTER their tech support ... a multi-billion-dollar corporation).
NEVER overlook the obvious. Especially if you're writing end-user documentation, or (in a manufacturing or production process) writing out procedures manuals. What's blindingly obvious to you might be completely opaque to someone else.
Speaking of overlooking the obvious, just look at how many people DON'T do the obvious, and wash their hands after using the toilet. Obviously disgusting when you think of it, but people willfully overlook the obvious.
Again, it bears repeating - NEVER overlook the obvious. Just ask the patient who have had the wrong leg amputated - EVEN AFTER WRITING "NOT THIS LEG" IN MARKER ON THEIR LEG. they never thought that the doctor might only see "THIS LEG" because of the coverings in place. To them, it was OBVIOUS the doctor would see everything they wrote. And to the doctor, it was OBVIOUS that "THIS LEG" meant "THIS LEG" - but they were both wrong, and as you know, two
That list is a load of crap. Pure schadenfreude motivated by a desire to make mediocre people feel better about being mediocre.
Einstein was a notorious womanizer, not exactly a candidate for autism.
Jane Austen? Are you fricking kidding me? Everything we know of her life (not a whole lot admittedly, since her sister burned her letters) says the exact opposite, a relative called her the 'silliest, most affected husband hunting butterfly' she'd ever seen. Not a candidate either.
The list itself admits it is bullshit speculation, and that what is known about many of the people on it contradicts anything resembling an autism spectrum or asperger's diagnosis.
Look, I know the structure is off 'cause there aren't any transitions, but the original essay didn't have many of them either. I also can't mimic her style well enough to write the transitions for her. Though hell, I admit the whole "improved essay" (and dude, even I don't consider it better so much as shorter and still retaining the most important info) was trollish.
open source modern art: laser taggi
Contrast with: "Shorter = less crap.", 1 symbol, 3 words, vs your 1 number, 7 words.
That's not even a repentance, so it's a bad comparison. As, I now realize, your original claim 'cause the "500 words are longer" was part of a 177 word discussion I was actually answering.
Couldn't do it in 125 the first time?
No, which is why editing is a good thing. Sorry I didn't think a response for a slashdot post required lots of fine tuning.
"Does this dress make me look fat?" A simple "Yes" will condemn you. A "No", without any other words of reassurance, likewise is a major faux pas.
I'm a girl, so if I'm being asked it's usually 'cause they want the truth.
Look, words are how we communicate - sometimes less is more, sometimes less is less.
To an extent I agree with you, which is why I like flexible word limits, but I think most things can be pared down and just as brilliant if need be.
open source modern art: laser taggi
No one was claiming engineers failed to communicate dangers, only that they were in no way effective at communicating them. There's a difference between just communicating something and persuading or influencing someone to change a position. The former is the "I sent an email" model of communication while the later requires communication skills.
NASA management wasn't tied to the idea of killing astronauts so I think the idea that they were completely unconvincable is a silly and defeatist point of view to take. Even Feynman agrees:
This is a direct call for engineers and scientists to inform management of technological problems, and that role requires the ability to write far more than a 500 word essay.
And this speaks volumes. Interacting with others under the assumption that "I seek the truth while they peddle in bullshit" is precisely the attitude that will get you sidelined and ignored. Technical ability isn't worth a damn if you can't convince anyone your ideas are worth listening to. If your idea is so important, your insight so invaluable or your invention so world-changing why not spend 25% of the time you spent on the technical side of things figuring out how to convince others of its merit?
sentence, not repentance
open source modern art: laser taggi
I don't think that word means what you think it does.
Repentance:
1. The act or process of repenting.
2. Remorse or contrition for past conduct or sin
Just because it passed the "spillingckucker" doesn't make it correct.
But if you want, I can even remove the symbol:
"Shorter, less crap." 3 words.
Look, this whole MIT essay thing is not a valid method of weeding out candidates who have made it into the short list (the top 10%). Not if it's only going to be a couple of hundred words. And especially since you KNOW that there's a lot of apple-polishing and "writing to the test". Because it's not valid, it's inherently unfair, and too open to manipulation and evaluator bias. Better to contact the teachers, and ask for examples of submitted work that weren't written with MIT in mind, no?
Well to be fair if he was aiming for a low word count he probably wouldn't have went with the fluffy and decorative "Fourscore and seven years ago".
You just got troll'd!
Well yeah, I agree on that point as well. In another post I mentioned that I always go over the 500 word limit. But I was just referring to it in shorthand since it *is* the biggest essay question they ask.
All your base are belong to Wii.
I consider your reply an improvement over your first post.
Dude, I posted a correction (before your post) 'cause I knew I screwed up.
Better to contact the teachers, and ask for examples of submitted work that weren't written with MIT in mind, no?
Most teachers will encourage their students to polish the essays up for MIT, and some will even help with the polishing. Also, the personal essay isn't required to see if the student can write, it's to gain a glimpse into the students psyche.
From what I've heard, essays barely count anyway; they only help borderline candidates and don't affect stellar ones at all (unless there's a major discrepancy between the essay and the rest of the applications package). For borderline cases, word count isn't going to affect their ability to convey the core of who they are all that much. I've read tons of personal statements/personal essays/etc. and just don't see that many that couldn't be shortened and still retain their essence.
And especially since you KNOW that there's a lot of apple-polishing and "writing to the test".
Essays should be written such that they answer the question being asked, and evidence that the student can edit probably doesn't hurt.
open source modern art: laser taggi
I'm not sure whether to feel relieved or scared by your post seeing as how I am currently in the middle of applying to a PhD program at Carnegie-Mellon.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." - C.S. Lewis
Also, 500 words is not a long essay. And standardized tests and grades are a poor judge of talent.
Agreed on both points. I think what all this boils down to is that the key to getting better answers is to do away with the questions. More schools are making SAT scores optional because, while it makes for easy racking and stacking, it tells you very little about the applicant beyond "alble/unable to score well on a big test." In reality, most of the application items are little more than good/neutral/bad check boxes (insert generic off-topic D&D joke here if you must). Outside of the truly exceptional and the painfully unqualified, most applicants are largely indistinguishable when judged by the typical criteria.
And then there's the essay. This should be an opportunity for the applicant to fill in some of the gaps left by the application, but all too often it is filled with trite nonsense like the example essay. The alternative is the set of mini-essays, but I personally despise that sort of application (any school that required one of those types of applications was immediately crossed off my list). Judging from the comments here, people tend to strongly prefer one, the other, or something else entirely. Maybe there's some utility in using the format to narrow the focus to particular personality types, but I don't see how employing a rigid structure in this part of the application is any more useful than requiring SAT scores.
My own opinion is that all of this should be optional but encouraged, with no limitations or requirements. Applicants who don't include something aren't penalized, but those who do have the advantage of presenting a more complete picture of themselves to the admissions staff (and anyone who sends a thousand-page manuscript is automatically rejected, no matter how ornate the binding is). The minimum/maximum lengths and BS topics absolutely have to go. Giving examples of preferred topics is helpful, but any required elements will make the essay less about the applicant and more about the requirement. Opening this part up to more than just essays (while requiring that it be the applicant's own work) is probably ideal, but I can understand why an admissions office would want to avoid truckloads of abstract sculptures and creative uses of fecal matter.
Personally, it didn't take me long to realize that I could just take something that I wanted to write and fit that to the essay topics. Once you understand the purpose of the essay, it becomes a simple matter to come up with an answer without knowing the question. When I applied to college, I wrote one essay and sent it with each of my applications. Aside from the 500-word limit (mine is 1850 words), it fits the topic of the MIT essay in question (not perfectly, but it wouldn't take too much massaging to fix that). It didn't get me into Harvard or anything, but it served its purpose and didn't require any effort to be wasted on bullshitting.
(Padding to reach 500 words.)
All students write essays. All evaluators judge essays. Randomly split the final evaluation formula so that 50% of the evaluations ignore the essay scores...
Excellence is an attitude.
grades and standardized testing scores are what matter at MIT.
And, statistically speaking, money. Hey, don't blame me, I know no one wants to hear this any more than people want to hear about racism or sexism at a favored place, but that's just the numbers. I wish I could link to the site that has more than just Pell numbers but that site appear to be down at the moment, but its enlightening.
This isn't about word count. Read the linked essay. If a prerequisite for informing management is being able to write a calamity such as that, then what kind of information is expected to be given to management. The answer; false information. Information twisted and massaged to give management what they want to hear. That is in fact worse than no information being passed because an engineer lacks the skills.
Someone who wasn't too great at making graphs designed some slides talking about the problems with O-rings and temperatures. That means an Engineer felt strongly enough about the problem that they raised it as an issue. Are you telling me that management's failure to grasp the simple point he was making, colder temperatures break O-rings, was his fault? The title on his slides is "History of O-ring Damage in Field Joints", but his poor graphical presentation meant that the misfortune but competent managers couldn't understand his basic point? Then you declare that all that was required was a curve fitted using statistical modelling techniques far outside the scope of most engineering courses. Are you so sure they wouldn't have required some 3D coloured graphs with sound and a soundtrack or an animated Chuck Jones short in order to get the point across to a group of people so unmercifully stupid.
So what you are saying is that if you cannot convince someone who 1) doesn't understand, 2) doesn't really care and 3) who actively seeks to implement bad ideas, then your idea's and recommendations aren't worth a danm? Is this how our industry and economy are to be run? People with no real expertise running enterprises that they do not understand, even at a basic level? Nasa management should have consisted, largely, of engineers, rocket scientists and astronauts. Instead it consisted of MBAs, financiers, political appointees, and other such "leaders" whose only real skills were in writing 500 word essays designed to impress similarly unqualified persons, and who could only grasp a point when it was presented in the form of a dazzling powerpoint presentation.
The problem is not with the engineers who know how to perform their jobs. The problem is with people who know how to write 500 word canards that get them into jobs they don't know how to do.
May the Maths Be with you!
yeah but dude, aspbergers! its okay to not get outside and learn communication skills if you have aspbergers!
I knew a kid who really had aspbergers. It was a fuck of a lot more than being antisocial and into computers. Have you ever bitten someone and screamed and cried in front of the entire school because you were touched wrong? But were generally able to communicate your point in a way that, while monotone, was actually understandable and smart, proving that you werent too deep in the autism spectrum of inability to communicate?
This trend of self diagnosing aspergers and diagnosing others with aspbergers from your armchair needs to end. get the fuck outside and stop excusing your lack of social skills with a disease that you probably dont have
I would rather have a shut in engineer who does the math right vs an engineer with a hangover from last night going ehh ill just sign off on it.
Yeah fuck those people who do things sometimes that arent 100% related to their jobs and may be self-indulgent. Why can't I sometimes be selfindulgent?? Oh yeah, because I'm a productive member of society. Unlike those morons lol look at them go out and socialize and have fun sometimes while "holding" a job haha they cant be capable at anything if they are going to bars when they aren't working.
A few serious points, MIT has high rates of suicide and I also hear about high rates of alcoholism (drinking alone in a room is much WORSE than going to a party and drinking). Also, your idea that every engineer who made anything ever did, will do and is doing nothing except engineering. No social life, no spouse, no kids, no friends no relaxing, just constant physics and math problems for you. I really dont understand your post at all, a hungover engineer signing off on a dangerous design.. sounds more like a character flaw unrelated to how they choose to spend their free time (and unrelated to their choice to have free time).
Yes, this is exactly the engineer's fault. They held critical information unknown to management (o-rings will fail below certain temperatures resulting in catastrophic failure) and failed in making that point. They titled their slides "History of O-ring Damage in Field Joints" and made a bunch of bad charts when they should have used a graph and titled it "Below Certain Temperatures, Shuttle go BOOM!". If they felt it was a life-or-death situation it may have called for, dare I say it, clip-art. You expect management to go "Oh wow, one of these genius engineering types showed us these charts and I'm not sure what they meant but we should call off the launch because I think he said it was bad or something". I expect an engineer who believes they are in a situation where loss of life may occur to put at least a bullet point at the end saying "If you don't do this, you could risk the shuttle and its passengers" or "Because of this, launches below X degrees have a XX% increased risk of catastrophic failure".
If they haven't been taught the skills to do that, then this is where MIT focusing on liberal arts and communication skills can come in to teach new engineers how to avoid those mistakes. Think of it as an engineering problem. If you study how bridges fail because of their structure, also study how bridges fail because of communication breakdowns amongst the design and build crews.
Yes, exactly this. The world is full of geniuses who never accomplished a damn thing because they couldn't convince anyone their ideas were worth a damn. They piss everyone off or talk over their heads and they sit and wonder why they never got anything done. It's precisely because they thought that coming up with the great idea was the finish and not the start. The world will very rarely recognize the genius of your idea and come flocking to your door. You need to be able to explain it to the non-propeller-heads in the world in a way that they can understand because, unless your idea is trivial, you'll need lots of those people to pull it off.
I agree with sentiment that one must measure potential, ability, or intelligence - but disagree strongly that you can't come up with at least reasonable metrics to give you a ballpark idea that the person is at all qualified. For example:
1. Potential - see what the person has done in the past with their resources/intelligence. Even if they are really limited - if they did something interesting and show a desire to explore and create unique things using those talents/resources - then they would be likely to do so in the future. This is favored over someone what shrugs and goes 'meh'.
2. Ability - ask them to demonstrate ability at any other task of their choosing. If they have or can do so, this shows the qualities of building new abilities - namely - that they can practice, put in the hours required to become able, stay focused for a period of time, can set goals, and have a mental picture of what that looks like. Again preferred to someone that just walked in with no history in this
3. Intelligence - there are many ways to measure this - from SAT's, to sit them down with a box of parts and see if they can put together a lego set or wire a light socket. Depends on the skill you're looking for.
Yes, none of these are foolproof - but your alternative is to throw a dart at a dartboard and choose randomly. I bet I'd do better than random.
Well of course they had to make it easier to get in. You wouldn't want to be sued by someone who couldn't write. I am surprised they don't just go with the community college approach. Submit an application, pay your fee, show residence, and get a course catalog.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
You're apparently still a jackass.
"Two people might both be intelligent and perform well with tests. One of these might get on well with others, have good listening skills while the other is only interested in their own opinion. One may may be liked and respected by his team the other resented and ridiculed. How are these two even remotely identical?"
Answer: One is an upper level manager at your comapny and the other was laid off due to poor performance reviews citing gregarious fraternization with co-workers. Take a wild guess which is which.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
I have to agree that, at the small word counts we're looking at (whether it's 125 words or 500 words), this is true because there's not all that much there. Now, if they were talking about 5,000 - 25,000 words, there'd be a chance of actually getting to know a bit about the person behind the writing - sometimes.
Here's a thought. A better "test", if you really are interested in getting some insight into the person's capabilities, would probably be to have candidates take part in an online debate, subject not disclosed beforehand. You'll quickly sort out the wallflowers from the participators, those who can defend their ideas from those who go "because ... I don't know, just 'cuz, okay", and those who can string together a cogent sentence consistently from the "my mom proof-reads all my submissions" crowd, as well as finding those candidates who can build upon other people's comments and come up with something approaching a solution.
You'd even get a transcript so that a second evaluator can compare notes, and so that the whole process can be evaluated, fine-tuned, etc.
Just a thought ... but anything's got to be better than a twitter-sized "essay". It's not rocket science, after all.
Now, if they were talking about 5,000 - 25,000 words, there'd be a chance of actually getting to know a bit about the person behind the writing - sometimes.
Very few people, even talented writers, are capable of writing good 15-100 page essays about themselves. Even if the interview committee had a chance to read these things, they'd probably be bored out of their mind by most of them.
A better "test", if you really are interested in getting some insight into the person's capabilities, would probably be to have candidates take part in an online debate, subject not disclosed beforehand.
They could probably just modify the interview to include bits and pieces of this. They could even throw a short essay into the interview if the interviewers were willing.
Cooper Union's take home exams seem like a very sensible approach to admissions, but MIT sees many more applicants so it may not be practical for the size.
Just a thought ... but anything's got to be better than a twitter-sized "essay".
The twitter sized essay though is perfectly serviceable for quickly explaining who a person is. It's not any shorter than a personal statement, and almost every grad school under the sun requires those in their applications.
open source modern art: laser taggi
I don't know, maybe we're talking past each other here. You seem to agree with me that management is chronically inept at running certain enterprises, but then we disagree on the problem being that engineers aren't able to communicate their ideas. In my view, these points are at odds in the context of this story. My argument is that the 500 word essay and requirements like it do not aid engineers in doing their job, including communication skills, but do aid managements types from gaining merit where they do not deserve it. Ultimately you end up with the Nasa management board who literally need to have information hammered into their heads for it to be transferred.
The problem as I see it is the makeup and skillset of management. If you look at the Manhatten project or the Apollo program, you find people like Oppenheimer or von Braun at the senior management level. Not only were they trained scientists, they were also among the very top men in their field. Modern Nasa appoints people like George Deutsch, who don't even hold a college degree, to senior management. Deutsch is only an obvious symptom of an underlying pathology in Nasa's organisation. A pathology brought about in no small part in reliance on metrics such as the 500 word essay to determine a persons fitness for their position.
May the Maths Be with you!
He could be homosexual.
May the Maths Be with you!
Out of curiosity, how exactly do you deal with bosses who don't care about details and only want to hear good news when you try to tell them that the resources you have and the job that needs to be done are fundamentally incompatible?
Use the word "but" as in "yes I can get your stupidly ambitious project done, but by my not so ambitious deadline, unless you give me this amount of resources". If the first thing your boss hears is a "yes", then you'll probably get your extended deadline or extra resources. If you don't the you can say "I told you so" at the end, and you'll get your way next project. Also, always build some slack into your estimate, so your boss can negotiate you down to a realistic time scale or, even better, you can beat your deadline making yourself look good.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
Yes. I think we can all agree that someone's facility with language is no indicator of the quality of their ideas. That's why the best TED talks are characterized only by grunting and the throwing of fecal matter.
Here's a suggestion: Why not simply split candidates' heads open and look at the ideas themselves?
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Er, uh, how is the genius engineer going to explain his/her idea to the communication genius if he/she is not capable of communication?
You understand that this isn't about marketing, right? The purpose of the essay is to distinguish between the engineer who can engage other engineers and the one who can't — it's not aimed at finding the engineer who can develop a branding campaign for his/her widget.
The notion that there is _any_ field of human endeavor in which communication is not essential is just ridiculous.
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"That kind of ability comes about a couple of times in a generation."
Maybe...but they're not talking, so who knows?
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
You're correct that it was the decision-makers' problem, but not how you think - they should have fired, or never hired, such poor communicators. Their JOB is to communicate with their team, and to hire a team they can communicate with. If a team isn't communicating adequately, it's the manager's fault - for hiring incompetent engineers, or for being a poor communicator.
ResidntGeek