Students + chatgpt will figure out what tools colleges are using to figure out if the essay was AI generated or not + why.
Just a story, and not saying it is common, but my buddy's son had his Ivy League (Princeton I recall) in person interview. Apparently, one of the first questions he was asked by the interviewer was do you know who I am. The kid said no and said something to the effect that he wanted to come into the interviewer without any preconceived notions (obviously that was the wrong move). Apparently, the interviewer was offended and the interviewer ended the interview fairly quickly. He just graduated Dartmouth, and has a sweet job in NYC.
if it were anyone else, I'd probably agree with you but Grace likes to argue one minute aspect of things over and over again as though it represents the whole entire picture. I was pointing out to her why her argument about essays aren't true, even for math majors.
The devil is in the minutia. “Close enough” is insufficient in more things than just math. If you had qualified your argument to the last 100 from the get go, I would have agreed with you but pointed out the same applied to the interview, if there was one.
One of the first things the private counselors tell their clients is google your interviewer.
When that first started to happen, it creeped me out. The first time a candidate asked about how I like working at some-place and if I knew so-and-so, the parent of a friend of theirs, I was sincerely taken aback. Then it normalized. (But I agree that asking "do you know who I am?" is a little much.)
From my vantage point, as an interviewer who sees applications and writes a recommendation but has no insight into the actual decision process, this seems pretty close to the truth. Except for a few obvious duds (candidates that don't seem to even want to go to the school) all the kids I interview are amazing and I would be proud to have them as classmates. Yet almost none of them get in. I've given up trying to guess which ones will because my track record is so abysmal.
Have to stroke the academic elites' ego.
The ideal student-athlete applicant has good academic and test scores (within the established minimums for the school in question), is an elite athlete in their sport as recognized by state, regional, or national organizations, has a legacy hook to the school, and has parents wealthy enough that they want no more than a token scholarship in order to assure a spot on the roster.
That might be a scene from Risky Business, actually.
I agree with you on coaching, but the pay to play system is unique to the United States and a handful of other countries like China. In Europe, the truly elite, both boys and girls, play academy ball. The system has its own horrors including using kids and then throwing them away when they are off the academic track, but pay to play is not one of them. Everyone else plays tiered rec, and while it can also be described loosely as "pay to play", fees are more akin to AYSO than our pay to play system and most of the coaches are volunteers. The pay to play system developed in the US because of a handful of factors including: a) it's function, like other club sports, is to create college athletes and not professionals...Europe doesn't have a collegiate athletic system in the same way we do...it's more like intramural sports; b) the lack of knowledgeable coaches (hence all the British and Latin American imports); c) AYSO's reluctance to tier, and d) the dearth of fields that were available in the United States for the longest time and which remain a problem (interestingly Latin America does not have that problem, as there are fields everywhere, but Europe does outside of the UK....The European answer to the problem was futsal and small sided games up until the really late ages, in Spain as late as 14).
While the clubs in Europe do make some money with camps and events most of their funding comes from selling the players they develop. Pay-to-play won't end in the US until the clubs are allowed to sign and sell players.
