MIT Axes the 500-Word Application Essay 441
netbuzz writes "No longer will those applying to MIT have to write the storied 'long' essay — long as in 500 words. 'We wanted to remove that larger-than-life quality to that one essay and take away a bit of the high-stakes nature of that one piece,' says the dean of admissions. Not everyone agrees with the bow to brevity, including a current MIT student who penned a scathing critique in The Tech and offers up her own essay as an example of what the form can provide to both MIT and the applicant." [125 words, including these.]
Re:word quota (Score:2, Informative)
Good riddence (Score:3, Informative)
"My inner cynic wants to say 'tough, it's their fault if they produce some bland over-processed generic drivel,'" says the woman who wrote this bland, over-processed, generic drivel [clarebayley.com] for her own essay. "Word count: 447. Couldn't have done it in less." What an amazing coincidence that her essay needed 447 out of 500 words. It didn't need 505 and she had to make it worse by cutting good stuff, and she didn't need 200 but felt obligated to pad it out. Truly amazing.
College admission essays are bullshit. Ones that ask for biography are doubly so. Like the interview question, "What is your greatest weakness?", responding with honesty is usually the wrong policy. Instead you build up a carefully honed lie designed to impress the interviewer. There is no benefit to this for anyone involved.
Not as simple as that. (Score:5, Informative)
I am a tester.
It is not that easy to do. Something like the SAT needs to be able to ascertain the level of a very broad population of users. That is done by targeting items at examinees of a certain ability, using item response theory difficulty estimates acquired in pilot. Yes, you could add more difficult questions, but those are going to render very little information about most people who take them, because they won't get them right. Because the edges of the bell curve are so thin, throwing a bunch of hard questions at the top end will water down the results for the majority of users. Ideally, you want most of your items that are very close to the level of the examinees, so you get nice "high-resolution" (although no one uses that term but me, since I came in from IT and explain everything as though it were a computer) discriminations of ability for the most people possible.
The workaround for this problem is to tailor the test to the examinee, real-time, with computer-adaptive testing. So let's say you get an item with a difficulty estimate of 1 correct; now the computer will hit you with one at 1.2, for example, and keep ramping up until you kind of level off at getting 50/50 right, which is where it decides you belong. Once it has you figured out, it either just throws easy ones at you so you feel good about yourself, or starts serving up items still undergoing pilot testing. Either way, what you do after that point will not affect your score.
This sounds great, and it would be great, if it worked reliably. The problem is that the thing has to kick in somewhere at the beginning of the test, and define a broad range that you belong in, and then a narrower range, and then a narrower range, etc. What this basically does is unfairly "weight" the first few items of the test, because they are the ones that will determine what large band of scores you will be eligible for. Once the machine has pegged you at the lower half, say, there is no way for you to break out of that, because it's never going to give you those harder questions. If that's not where you belong, you won't be able to demonstrate that, and you'll just get the top score of that band. So if you start the thing out and you're nervous and you just make a dumb mistake, that mistake can really cost you--much more than it would later in the test. All these models are probabilistic, so guessing and just making dumb mistakes are accounted for. But the moment you go adaptive, the beauty of the model is trashed at the beginning and doesn't come into effect until later.
Many of the tests which moved to computer-adaptive methods have gone back to just serving a range of items, but one, the GRE, is still adaptive, even though ETS (the company that makes it and the SAT and the TOEFL) knows it doesn't work reliably (people taking the test over and over can get very different scores). Evidently there are financial/political reasons they can't get rid of it (rumor). And I have to take it again here in a few months to start applying for PhD programs. One of the drawbacks of researching psychometrics is that at some point you'll have to take one of these tests, knowing what the problems are.
So there you go. Yes, adding harder questions would indeed get you better discrimination among the top examinees, but at the cost of discrimination for the bulk of them. Ideally, you could just have the examinee come back and take the next-hardest test, but no one would go for that. Or perhaps the tests could be tiered, with linking items/anchoring, and the examinee could choose what level they wanted to take. I don't know of any major tests that do that, though, and having disjoint populations might cause a problem...
Anyway, there's more testing minutiae than you require.
What will they replace the essay with? (Score:4, Informative)
There may be a point of removing the essay, but what will they replace with?
Ten years ago, when I seeked for university admission in Korea, a country which has extremely competitive university admission procedures, we had essay exams. They give you approximately 500~1000 words of whatever text (it can be some literature, news article, textbook text, or whatsoever), followed by a short question which has to be answered in a 1,600 character (around 500 wordsessay. With something like 2 hours time limit.
With only two hours, students had only something like 10 minutes to read the text, 5 minutes to think, 10 minutes to plan the structure of the essay, and about an hour to write 500 words on a piece of paper, including making correceionts. In other words, if you cannot understand the text and figure out what to write within 20 or so minutes, you are doomed.
Back then, and for many more years, I thought it was unfair. I wanted to do engineering, but the essay looked ridiculous. However, after ten years, I found that preparing for the essay exam had greatly enhanced my writing skills (which I find really important - sometimes more important than math or physics), and it forced me to read a lot of books of all sorts of topics.
I think these kind of essay exams (with tight time limits) may help, but unlike Korea, United States is a fairly large country, and it may be too difficult to have all the students seeking admision in one place.
Re:And why should they care? (Score:4, Informative)
If the scores are all the same, then it really doesn't matter who gets in. An essay is a shitty way to select engineering students and doesn't gauge anything other than their ability to make up 500 words of bullshit.
Not necessarily. 500 words is actually very little. If you want to get a couple of points across in 500 words, it forces you to write clearly and concisely - and having seen some of the dross written by supposedly educated people, "ability to write clearly and concisely" is definitely something to be encouraged.
Re:hard pressed to find a single great scientist.. (Score:5, Informative)
No life skills there at all.
dick.
I read the sample essay (Score:5, Informative)
What I got from the essay?... apparently MIT isn't rejecting people based on their narcissistic views of their own preciousness.
God, that was horrible.
Don't get me wrong - I agree with her in principle that it's NOT excessive to ask 18-yr-olds to express themselves cogently in a 500 word essay. I think that's a good hurdle for top schools.
But her essay wasn't a good example, it was drivel. Self-obsessive, whiny, emo drivel.
Re:And why should they care? (Score:3, Informative)
They have to reject a lot of perfectly good people anyway (what's the application rate? 10 applicants for each place?) If you have to reject 90% of the candidates anyway, you need to find a valid way of choosing the 10% you have room to accept. When undoubtedly most of the applicants will be sound on engineering type things, it seems perfectly acceptable to accept the technically sound AND able to communicate applicants in preference to the others.
Re:US universities (Score:3, Informative)
While this is not a problem at MIT quite yet, the ratio of women to men in college was about 1.3 to 1 in 2006. That's about 56% female. In 2007 it was 58% female.
I'm having a hard time finding 2008 or 2009 data, but the trend shows no sign of reversing so far.
Thus if you're applying to college _right now_, being male is actually not that bad, especially once you get out of the top-tier schools. (And even in the top tier, Harvard is more than 50% female in its most recent entering classes; MIT in 2008-2009 had 1,885 female undergrads [http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/life/women_at_mit/index.shtml] out of a total population of 4,153 [http://web.mit.edu/facts/enrollment.html]. That's 45% female.)
Re:What will they replace the essay with? (Score:3, Informative)