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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!"
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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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.
I've met my fair share of "nerdy girls" who write in similar manner to the example essay cited above. It's been my experience that in addition to being bright they're self-absorbed, easily offended, and absolutely won't ever be interested in having sex (with you, that is.) Probably a fan of Babylon 5 too. I imagine they all come off the same assembly line somewhere.
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..
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
Who did they axe about this?
Whom did they axe.
(... no, that's too subtle, the mods will never work it out. In any case, I'm pretty sure that MIT would "ax" rather than "axe".)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.