Re:We Don’t Do Legacy (2012)
by dsacco on Sunday April 02, 2017 @09:53AM
(#14017163)
Ah, Stuyvesant. I have fond memories of competing against them in regional/national Speech & Debate tournaments. Great school.
Incidentally, if you want another metric that makes the Ivies jump over themselves to admit students, it's placing in basically any extracurricular contest/tournament they sponsor or host. For example, placing in the top six at Harvard Nationals for Speech & Debate essentially guarantees you admission if you have decent grades. For some categories, this is less difficult than you'd think.
That said, two of the most intelligent people I have ever known placed in Harvard Nationals and later went to the school. I can't speak empirically to the correlation vs causation of placing in these sorts of tournaments, but I think those two in particular could have gone to any school they wanted. One was a student at Stuyvesant.
On the other hand, I also knew someone who was a concert pianist in addition to a nationally ranked Speech & Debate competitor. He also had excellent grades and was admitted to five Ivies and MIT. I don't think he applied to any safety schools. He was someone I would consider extremely capable in the sense of time management and executive functioning, but in raw intellectual capacity (such as critical thinking), he never stood out to me.
But I could be mistaken in these value judgements. It's hard to even define intelligence rigorously. I think that's part of the problem with these discussions. How do we qualify intelligence, then set out to design a meritocracy that controls for the nature (having intelligent parents) component of intelligence, if we can only limit the nurture aspects (socioeconomic and parenting)?
Incidentally, if you want another metric that makes the Ivies jump over themselves to admit students, it's placing in basically any extracurricular contest/tournament they sponsor or host. For example, placing in the top six at Harvard Nationals for Speech & Debate essentially guarantees you admission if you have decent grades. For some categories, this is less difficult than you'd think.
That said, two of the most intelligent people I have ever known placed in Harvard Nationals and later went to the school. I can't speak empirically to the correlation vs causation of placing in these sorts of tournaments, but I think those two in particular could have gone to any school they wanted. One was a student at Stuyvesant.
On the other hand, I also knew someone who was a concert pianist in addition to a nationally ranked Speech & Debate competitor. He also had excellent grades and was admitted to five Ivies and MIT. I don't think he applied to any safety schools. He was someone I would consider extremely capable in the sense of time management and executive functioning, but in raw intellectual capacity (such as critical thinking), he never stood out to me.
But I could be mistaken in these value judgements. It's hard to even define intelligence rigorously. I think that's part of the problem with these discussions. How do we qualify intelligence, then set out to design a meritocracy that controls for the nature (having intelligent parents) component of intelligence, if we can only limit the nurture aspects (socioeconomic and parenting)?