= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
magfrump comments on Negative and Positive Selection - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (262)
I know that the admissions staff are generally mediocre students who went to that school. But I would expect their system to notice things like "Intel Science Fair winner" and have that trump any GPA signal.
(More reasonably, I think they have a file of names called "admit these people", which it checks applicants against (and if they're on the list, sends it to a human to verify), and Andraka's win was publicized widely enough that he probably made it onto the list, and if someone is doing their job well they routinely import the list of winners from things like the Intel Science Fair into that list.)
I'm fairly confident that this is a thing that actually exists, because of the associated prestige. Universities would get this if they were optimizing for status, without optimizing for learning at all.
However, you also have to consider marginal payoff relative to the cost. Most Science Fair winners will also score high according to the standard formula (involving GPA et cetera); any additional prestige the institution would gain by also admitting the very few who don't probably wouldn't be worth the cost of having such a separate system.
Unrelated to my other points: When in your experience have universities acted efficiently, as opposed to just "do things that sound like they'll increase status"?
While in some senses I agree, the whole process of admissions just consists of people putting stamps on paper. If one of those people recognizes someone from a news article and just says "hey let's stamp this" it doesn't actually require more bureaucracy. Since all your processes are run by humans it doesn't actually cost anything to add human judgment to your system.
For example, I would be EXTREMELY SURPRISED if there was a computer program that STOPPED a university from admitting someone if they had too low a GPA. It's just that the computer program wouldn't present them to be considered in the first place unless they looked.
In terms of practical tests, I propose that if we look up the set of Intel Science Fair winners, see if there's information about their GPAs, and then look at what universities they got into, I hypothesize that if there are any with GPAs below, say, 3.7, they will still get in to high end universities that normally would only accept students with 4.0s (Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins come to mind). I agree that it's unlikely that you'll find any with recorded GPAs below say 3.0, so the question may be purely theoretical anyway.