(2025-07-30) Zvim Childhood And Education12 College Admissions

Zvi Mowshowitz on Childhood and Education #12: College Admissions

Table of Contents

• College Applications.
• The College Application Essay (Is) From Hell.
• Don’t Guess The Teacher’s Password, Ask For It Explicitly.
• A Dime a Dozen.
• Treat Admissions Essays Like Games of Balderdash.
• It’s About To Get Worse.
• Alternative Systems Need Good Design.
• The SAT Scale Is Broken On Purpose.

College Applications

In case you missed it, yes, of course Harvard admissions are way up and Harvard did this on purpose. The new finding is that Harvard was recruiting African American applicants in particular, partly in order to balance conditional acceptance rates. One could of course also argue that the goal was ‘to find more worthy students,’ with the counterevidence being that the test scores of such applicants declined as more applications came in (as they obviously would for any group) but the scores of those who got admitted didn’t change.

As a student, one needs to understand that schools love applications they can then reject, and might care about that even more depending on your details. So when they tell you to apply, that you have a shot, that is not the evidence you want it to be.

The College Application Essay (Is) From Hell

Or, your future depends on knowing exactly the right way to lie your ass off, and having sufficiently low integrity to do so shamelessly.

*One can ask questions like: If you can get hired by Google for an engineering job, you have a 4.4 GPA and a 1590 SAT score, and you get rejected by 5 University of California schools and 16 out of 18 schools overall, is it fair to say that was probably an illegal form of racial discrimination, as his lawsuit is claiming? It doesn’t automatically have to be that, there could in theory be other details of his application that are problems.

I’d like to say to that objection ‘who are we kidding’ but maybe?*

*You had two groups debating this recently, after a different applicant, Zack Yadegari, got rejected from all the colleges for being too successful and daring to write about that.

One group said this was the situation, And That’s Terrible.

The other group said, yes this is the situation, And You’re Terrible, get with the program or go off and die, oh and it’s just the essay, he can apply next year it’s fine.*

Gabriel: this is incredibly sad, someone spent their entire childhood to get into MIT with perfect scores without getting in, and now can't live his dream

The kid Felpix is quoting is going to have a fine future without academia, and yes they’d be a year ahead of the game if they’d spent all that time learning to code better instead of playing the college game. It’s not even clear they should have been trying to go to college at all, other than VCs wanting to see you go for a bit and then drop out.

Don’t Guess The Teacher’s Password, Ask For It Explicitly

Zack’s mistake was, presumably, asking the best writers he knew rather than people who know to write college essays in particular.

*If you’re writing your own college apps & want to know how to avoid these pitfalls, there are lots of great threads about this guy’s essay. Start here.

Mason: The essay is easily the most regressive and gameable part of the app. The point tech twitter is making is not that the essay is good, but that if this kid came from the "right" family his essay would have been ghostwritten by an admissions coach anyway*

Lastdance: "You must follow my lead and feign humility. If you are merely gifted then go somewhere else, it's the gifted liar we want!"

*every time people defend this system on its own terms it makes me grimace

do not validate a system that encourages kids to twist themselves into pretzels and then purports to judge their whole persons

the whole game is socially corrosive.*

A Dime a Dozen

Depending on where you set the bar for applicants, ‘statistically well-qualified’ might be ‘dime a dozen,’ maybe even being #1 in your HS with 1580 SAT and 18 5/5 APs is ‘a dime a dozen.’ That’s by design, as I discuss elsewhere, the tests cap out on purpose. If the top colleges wanted differentiation the tests would provide it.

*But you know what very much is not ‘a dime a dozen’? Things like being a USAMO winner or founding a $30mm ARR business.

If admissions chooses not to care much about even that, and merely puts it into the ‘statistical qualification’ bucket and mostly looks to see who within that bucket is better at playing the Guess the Teacher’s Password game and playing their PTCs (Personal Trauma Cards) and being members of the preferred groups and so on, well, it is what it is.*

Treat Admissions Essays Like Games of Balderdash

*And it’s totally fair to point out that this is indeed what it is, and that our academic system checks your ‘statistical qualifications’ but is mostly actively selecting for this form of strategic dishonesty combined with class performance and some inherent characteristics.

That is very different from saying that this is good, actually. It’s not good.*

College admission essays are not a place where words have meaning and you are representing your statement as true.

Oh, also, requiring all these hours of volunteer work is straight up enslavement of our kids for child labor, and not the good kind where you learn valuable skills.

the state colleges are sometimes doing it too. And that’s not okay, at all.

Analytic Valley Girl Chris: State universities should be legally mandated to accept any in state graduate who meets certain academic thresholds, save some compelling disqualification. Generic "not what we're looking for" shouldn't be allowed

The ‘top X% of your class’ system is excellent, such as Texas’s top 10% rule. I’d supplement that with a points system or threshold rules or both for grades, test scores and other quantifiable achievements, with a known minimum auto-admission threshold.

*Note the deadline. Because your decisions are deterministic, you get to move last.

As in, all they get to sweep up all these students whose essays were rejected or got discriminated against*

It’s About To Get Worse

The New York Times headline writers understood the assignment, although it’s even worse than this: Elite Colleges Have Found a New Virtue For Applicants To Fake.

*the ‘disagreement question’:

Alex Bronzini-Vender (Sophomore, Harvard University, hire him): This time I found a new question: “Tell us about a moment when you engaged in a difficult conversation or encountered someone with an opinion or perspective that was different from your own. How did you find common ground?”*

*This didn’t escalate quickly so much as skip straight to the equilibrium. Kids are pros.

The trouble is that the disagreement question — like much of the application process — isn’t built for honesty. Just as I once scrambled to demonstrate my fluency in D.E.I., students now scramble to script the ideal disagreement, one that manages to be intriguing without being dangerous.*

*So far, ordinary terrible, sure, fine, I suppose it’s not different in kind than anything else in the college essay business. Then it gets worse.

This fall, an expanding number of top schools — including Columbia, M.I.T., Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt and the University of Chicago — will begin accepting “dialogues” portfolios from Schoolhouse.world, a platform co-founded by Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, to help students with math skills and SAT prep.

High-schoolers will log into a Zoom call with other students and a peer tutor, debate topics like immigration or Israel-Palestine,*

“I don’t think you can truly fake respect,” Mr. Khan said.

*Even as intended this is terrible already:

Owl of Athena: Remember when I told you Sal Khan was evil? I didn't know the half of it!

Meet the Civility Score, courtesy of Khan's "Dialogues."

Get your kids used to having a social credit score*

Blightersort: it is kind of amazing that elite schools would look at the current world and worry they are not selecting for conformity strongly enough and then work on new ways to select for conformity

Except of course it is way worse than that on multiple levels.

*Of course you can fake respect. I do it and see it all the time. It is a central life skill.

Also, if you’re not generally willing to or don’t know how to properly pander to peers in such settings, don’t ‘read the room’ or are ugly? No college for you.*

Indeed, I’m willing to bet that going in with actual full empathy and curiosity will get you lower, not higher, scores than performative endorsement.

Neils Hoven: Oh look, they figured out how to scale ideological conformity testing

Not pledging your support for ending the state of Israel? No college for you

Quite possibly, there will be rampant discrimination of other kinds, as well. Expect lots of identify-based appeals. The game will be won by those who play to win it.

Alternative Systems Need Good Design

Zaid Jilani: Make SAT and GPA almost all of the college admissions standard, any essays should be analytical like on GRE rather than personal.

Kelsey Piper: yep. just cut all the holistic shit. it turns high school into hell without meaningfully identifying the kids most prepared to contribute at top schools let alone teaching them anything

*You do need a way to control for both outstanding achievement in the field of excellence.

I would thus first reserve some number of slots for positive selection outside the system*

I also think you need to have a list of achievements, at least on AP and other advanced tests, that grant bonus points. The SAT does not get hard enough or cover a wide enough set of topics.

If you want to count GPA at all, you need to adjust for school and by-class averages, and adjust for the success rate of the school of origin as a function of average-adjusted GPA controlling for SAT, and so on.

The ultimate question here is whether you want students in high school to be maximizing GPA as a means to college admissions. It can be a powerful motivating factor, but it also warps motivation. My inclination is to say you want to use it mostly as a threshold effect, with the threshold rising as you move up the ladder

Where it gets tricky is scholarships. Even if admission depends only on SAT+AP and similar scores plus some extraordinary achievements and threshold checks, the sticker prices of colleges are absurd. So if scholarships depend on other triggers, you end up with the same problem, or you end up with a two-tier system where those who need merit scholarships have to game everything

Sahsa Gusev has a fun thread pointing out various flaws that lead one back to a holistic approach rather than an SAT+GPA approach

*Another way of putting this is:

Sasha Gusev: Open: Office of the president at the new 100% Meritocratic University

President: We’ve admitted the top 2,000 applicants by GPA and SATs. How are they doing?

Admissions: Several hundred valedictorians who’ve never gotten a B in their life are now at the bottom of all their classes and are experiencing a collective mental breakdown. Also our sports teams are an embarrassment.

[Zvi’s alternative continuation]: President: Okay. Is there a problem?*

The SAT Scale Is Broken On Purpose Paul Graham: Part of the problem with college admissions is that the SAT is too easy. It doesn't offer enough resolution at the high end of the scale, and thus gives admissions officers too much discretion.

*If the SAT bell curve went up to 2000, then they’d be forced to care, and differentiate 1570 from 1970.

That doesn’t seem hard to do? All you have to do is add some harder questions?*

*Yeah, well, on that front it just got even worse, and the ACT is making similar changes:

Steve McGuire: Reading passages on the SAT have been shortened from 500-750 words down to 25-150*

Alex Tabarrok: SOD: "The SAT now caters to students who have trouble reading long, complex texts

*Meanwhile in the math section, students have more time per question and free use of a calculator, without the questions changing.

On top of that, this paper says the Math SAT declined in rigor by 71 points between 2008 and 2023, which would mean that we have a 107-point decline in average performance that cuts across major demographic groups.*

Yikes, but also comments point out that the decline is largely caused by more students taking the test, which should indeed cause them to lower the grading curve. Relative score is what matters, except that we’re running into a lot more cases where 800 isn’t getting the job done.

Schools could of course move to the Classic Learning Test (CLT) or others that would differentiate between students. Instead, they are the customers of the ACT and SAT, and the customer is always right.

*it cannot be overstated how much I see this screwing almost everyone and everything up:

Nephew Jonathan (QTing Tracing Woods above): I’m gonna hijack this: if there’s one thing that explains why everyone under the age of 40 seems to be a nervous wreck it’s the reduction of life to “guessing the teacher’s password” for everything.

Dating apps? Guess the girl’s password. College admissions? Grad school? HR personality screenings?*