Re:Does MIT consider legacy?
by abirch on Tuesday July 18, 2023 @12:23PM
(#36775025)
I think it's 60-70% of academic achievement can be explained by genes. If you know kids from a big family, their academic success can vary significantly although they have the same parents.
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Re:Does MIT consider legacy?
by sanitycheck on Tuesday July 18, 2023 @12:45PM
(#36775429)
Sure, and they may not all have the same colour eyes - variation is expected.
But still, we have nature (genes, 60-70%) and nurture (hey, parents again). What else is there?
Luck (excluding controllable factors by wealthy parents)
I'd say opportunities. When there are fewer kids matriculating into college it's easier to get into a better school (see Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers)
Professors and Teachers, the variability of them is huge.
Friends can have a huge impact as well. Is the norm to skip classes to go work on a startup or focusing on getting good grades?
Resources such as the Numberblocks which make math more visual and accessible. My pre-K kid was doing multiplication because of that show.
Yes, and identical twins raised apart show extremely similar academic achievement, far more similar than non-identical siblings raised in the same household. This strongly indicates that academic achievement is highly explained by genes but that recombination [1] causes enough scrambling to result in large variance among non-identical siblings.