MIT admissions

Factual Questions
1

I spoke to an old friend today - we hadn’t chatted in quite some time.

Among other things, he told me that his son is applying to college. My friend went to MIT and son apparently hopes to. The kid has excellent grades and a combined SAT score around 1520. Sounds like a good candidate.

But according to my friend, MIT has a new admissions policy that guarantees half the freshman slots to women. So his son has been told he has only an outside chance of being accepted. He was also told that his grades and scores would pretty well guarantee admission if he were female - indeed, they would put him into the top quarter of those who are accepted.

My first reaction is to be a bit skeptical. My friend is usually reliable, but it’s a little hard to believe that 1520 is marginal. And is it really true that there’s a “hard” quota of no more than 50% males? This is apparently a shift - but caused by what?

2

There is some truth to your friend’s statement. MIT does engage in some hard-core affirmative action of its own design. Their admissions process is somewhat mysterious so very few know exactly what they look for. They do tend to scoop up any qualified candidates from certain minority groups. Females get accepted at about 2.5 times the rate of males although there many fewer of them. If they didn’t do that, their student body would indeed be very heavily white and Asian males if they mainly used grades in combination with test score cutoffs. They don’t want that to happen. I have never heard of the 50% female rule though.

An old-style SAT score of 1520 is excellent by any measure, not marginal. However, Harvard and MIT take pride in rejecting students with perfect scores every year either to prove a point or because they were lacking elsewhere. The last time I checked, the old-style median SAT score at MIT was in the 1400’s. No one short of a 16 year old Nobel prize winner can be positive of being accepted there. However, they will accept many students with lesser numbers than this kid.

I doubt he has an “outside” chance. It sounds like he has a pretty good chance unless his grades aren’t great. There is only one way to find out though.

http://ben.mitblogs.com/archives/2005/01/happy_05.html

3

I don’t have much to add to what Shagnasty said except that I got a 1570 on the SAT and I didn’t get in to MIT. I applied early and was deferred, then rejected. However, my grades were not as high as they could have been. I had about a B+ average.

4

Officially, there is no quota, hard or soft. The line from the MIT admissions office is that they do not consider gender, and that they admit more females than males because, on average, female applicants to MIT are more qualified.

The actual statistics are that MIT accepts around 10% of the men who apply, and 30% of the women. The ratio of men to women is essentially 1:1, give or take a few percent depending on the year.

Is that a reasonable explanation? Not entirely. I’m sure it has some basis in reality, but the male/female ratio at MIT is too perfect (1:1) for me to believe there isn’t some deliberate intent behind it. Maybe the actual figures would be 10% men, 20% women if they decided to be truly gender-neutral.

As for what caused it, MIT has a bit of institutional guilt as regards gender equality: its last president, Charles Vest, went so far as to publicly admit in 2001 that MIT had “severely restricted the career of women faculty members, researchers, and students through sexist discrimination”*, and promised to take steps to remedy the situation. But I haven’t been here long enough, nor dug deep enough into the history, to say anything more about that topic. The new president, not surprisingly, is a woman.

For what it’s worth, I applied and was admitted to the class of 2008 with the following resume:

[ul]
[li]Grades of maybe 66% A’s, 33% B’s, in AP-level and just-below-AP-level courses[/li][li]1530 on SAT I (770V/760M)[/li][li]790 on SAT II Physics and SAT II Calculus, 770 on SAT II Writing[/li][li]Co-founded a technology startup (essentially - it’s complicated)[/li][li]Wrote several hundred thousand dollars worth of custom software for my school district, for free.[/li][li]A number of other independent jobs and projects, some for-pay, some not.[/li][li]A bunch of awards and things.[/li][li]Absolutely zero involvement with clubs, organized sports, or organized volunteerism.[/li][/ul]

It seems to me that significant extracurricular activities beyond the norm are really what they look for, regardless of gender. Grades and token resume-padding crap are not so important. Anyone with half a brain can master high school calculus, write a coherent essay, and get themselves voted president of the yearbook committee or something. They want to see more than that.

  • Wikipedia/MIT
5

I say this figuratively, of course - I don’t mean to insult anyone who failed algebra I.

6

Bolding mine. And the other 70% of the student body would be what gender?

7

LSL Guy - those figures represent the acceptance rate by gender, not the student body makeup by gender. Taking those acceptance rates and the 1:1 male-to-female student ratio, we can surmise that about 3 times more males than females apply to MIT.

8

“We’re nerds!”

Oh, wait, wrong kind of admission.

9

Hmmm.
Circa '93 one of my friends got into MIT.
She had an old SAT 1600 and something like a 3.7 or 3.8 GPA in her high school’s AP track. Decent but not outstanding extra-currics. Smart enough that she scared the hell out of me.
Got turned down by both Harvard and Yale, but given that she wanted to do a PhD in math, she probably got into the right place.

10

Yep, I was rejected from MIT with a 1600. Good grades, test scores, a sport and a musical instrument are not enough. You need to really be the best at something, and show that you are motivated not just within the system but outside of it as well.

The moral of the story is I ended up at CMU and it was probably a better fit for me, and I had a ton of fun there. But I do think there is affirmative action going on at the Engineering schools. Women, for whatever reason, are not choosing to major in math, science, and engineering, and so if the admissions process was gender-blind they would only be a small minority at these schools. Obviously the Universities don’t want this to happen so they have to correct for it somehow. MIT can do this without being too unfair, since the top candidates are so similar and there is so much competition that it’s not like they have to admit really poor female candidates to pad things out.

11

nitpick: why do people seem to think the undergrad institution matters much when someone’s planning on going for a Ph.D.? There is essentially no difference between, for instance, a Yale Ph.D. coming from MIT undergrad and one coming from the University of Maryland. As long as the undergrad school isn’t abysmal and you do good work, all that matters (as much as location matters at all) is the graduate institution.

12

That is absolutely correct.

My son had a 1590 SAT and was first in his class. In Quebec, high schools don’t have extramural sports and not much in the way of intramural either, although he did play hockey in a local kids league. He was active in the yearbook. But while he got into (and went to) Princeton, he was turned down by MIT.

13

MIT is in Cambridge. We don’t ask *ANY * questions.

14

Like most freshman they are “undecided” :wink:

15

Who’s at MIT?

As Absolute posted, and as the above link states, MIT has no official quota system (save a limit on the number of foreign applicants accepted). The student body is approximately 57% male, 43% female. This is virtually unchanged from when I was there (graduated 5 years ago).

While MIT has no quota system per se, MIT heavily promotes itself to women and under-represented minority applicants. Each spring MIT hosts (or hosted, anyway) a weekend wherein said individuals are invited to tour the campus, attend informational seminars and such, and most importantly, to be hosted by a current MIT student who could provide guidance, answer questions, and in general, give the prospective female/minority student a feel for campus life. MIT offers, on an informal basis, significant financial help to those who might not otherwise afford to attend this event.

Then there is the MITES program, which is basically a summer school that offers minority students an extra leg up on their advanced math and science skills during the summer after their junior year of high school. (Note that this is not offered to women who are not a member of a minority group.) The program is 100% scholarship based and attendees frequently go on to attend MIT.

As for SAT scores, during the time I was there, SAT scores were generally in the high 600s-mid 700s for the verbal, and mid 700s-800 for the math. I won’t give my scores, but I will say that they were generally in this range. The scores were not an accurate predictor of my success.

16

I got 1600 and was rejected by MIT.