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

Zvi Mowshowitz: Childhood and Education: 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 applications 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.

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

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.

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. All this effort could have been spent on becoming economically valuable and he’d now have his dream job.

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.

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!”

“but the personal statement is…”
…an arbitrary game of “guess what’s in my head,” inauthenticity embodied by writers and readers alike. an undignified hazing ritual whether written by you, your $200/hr advisor, or your good friend Claude.

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... well, it is what it is.

If you see someone thinking being a USAMO winner and founding a $30mm ARR business means they shouldn’t be feigning false humility, and think ‘that’s an asshole,’ well, I have a humble suggestion about who the asshole is in this situation.

Treat Admissions Essays Like Games of Balderdash

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.

given that it is common knowledge how this works, while I place a super high value on honesty and honor, I hereby give everyone reading this full ethical and moral permission to completely lie your ass off.

Aside from specific verifiable things like your GPA or SAT score, you can and should lie your ass off the same way you would lie when playing a game of Diplomacy or Balderdash. It doesn’t count, and I will not hold it against you, at all.

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.

Yes, obviously if you simply want ‘any college at all’ there will always be options for such students, but that degree and experience, and the connections available to be made, will offer dramatically lower value. Going is probably a large mistake.

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.

UTAustin: *we’re introducing the University of Austin’s new admissions policy:
If you score 1460+ on the SAT, 33+ on the ACT, or 105+ on the CLT, you will be automatically admitted, pending basic eligibility and an integrity check. Below that threshold, you’ll be evaluated on your test scores, AP/IB results, and three verifiable achievements, each described in a single sentence.
That’s it.
Apply here by April 15.

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. Then we get to find out what happens when you put them all together. And you get to see which employers are excited by that, and which aren’t.

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 basic version is indeed a new virtue to fake, combined with a cultural code to crack and teacher’s password to guess, the ‘disagreement question’:

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

students now scramble to script the ideal disagreement, one that manages to be intriguing without being dangerous.

So now there’s a new guessing game in town.

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, and rate one another on traits like empathy, curiosity or kindness.

“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.”

Nate Silver: This is basically affirmative action for boring people

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.

You can, and people constantly do, fake empathy, curiosity and kindness. It is not only a central life skill, but it is considered a central virtue.

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.

And then let’s address the elephant in the room. Notice this sentence:
High-schoolers will log into a Zoom call with other students and a peer tutor, debate topics like immigration or Israel-Palestine, and rate one another on traits like empathy, curiosity or kindness.

Neils Hoven: Oh look, they figured out how to scale ideological conformity testing.
Brain in a jar: Haha hot people and conformists will win. Fuck

If you have a bunch of high schoolers rating each other on ‘empathy, curiosity or kindness’ on the basis of discussions of those topics, that is a politics test.

Short of using AI evaluators (an actually very good idea), I don’t see a way around the problem that this is not a civility test, it is a popularity and ideological purity challenge, and we are forcing everyone to put on an act.

Also you see what else this is testing? You outright get a higher score for participating in more of these ‘dialogues.’ You also presumably learn, over time, the distribution of other participants, and what techniques work on them.

Alternative Systems Need Good Design

Most of the holistic stuff needs to go. The essay needs to either go fully, or become another test taken in person, ideally graded pass-fail, to check for competence

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, for those who are just very obviously people you want to admit.

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.

The other problem then is that at this level of stakes everything will get gamed. You cannot use a fully or even incompletely uncontrolled GPA if you are not doing holistic adjustments. GPAs would average 4.33 so fast it would make your head spin.

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

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, probably with the ‘immune tier’ rather small since even if you can afford full price that doesn’t mean you want to pay it.

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.

The problem is that we have tests that solve this problem but no one cares that much about them. Once you are maximizing the SAT, the attitude is not ‘well then, okay, let’s give them the LSAT or GRE and see how many APs they can ace,’ it’s ‘okay we’ll give them a tiny boost for each additional AP and such but mostly we don’t care.’

Steve McGuire: Reading passages on the SAT have been shortened from 500-750 words down to 25-150. They say “the eliminated reading passages are ‘not an essential prerequisite for college’ and that the new, shorter content helps ‘students who might have struggled to connect with the subject matter.’” The reality, of course, is that the test is getting easier because so many students are struggling.

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

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.

The only way to interpret this is that the colleges want to differentiate student ability up to some low minimum threshold, because otherwise the students fail out, but they actively do not want to differentiate on ability at the high end. They prefer other criteria. I will not further speculate as to why. (Mediocrity)