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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
"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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.