[stupac2]

Roughly speaking, to get admitted to Stanford you need both a GPA within ear-shot of perfect + 2200+ thee part SATs AND exceptional performance in something else ... plus some luck. I once heard this described by an admissions officer as needing "two excellences", i.e. academics plus something else.

If that were true I wouldn't be here. Still not sure exactly why I got in.

There are, at least from time to time, a few excellent musicians/artists/etc at Stanford that slip just a bit below the general standard on academics, but there are not 85+13 of them and they didn't slip to the sub-1100 two part SAT level.

There is a significant, difficult question in weighing what an individual athlete brings to campus in their combination of athletic and academic prowess. I don't know that Stanford always answers that question correctly, in fact there isn't an absolutely correct answer. I am happy in my belief that Stanford puts more care into addressing that question than most any other Division 1A school.
However, it's not reality to pretend that balancing act isn't going on and that athletic accomplishment in the money sports is really treated on an even level as other extra-activities.

I dunno about this. I met an awful lot of people at Stanford who weren't actually very visibly intelligent, by which I mean "able to process information and synthesize it into a coherent argument"*. Some of the discussion classes I took were absolutely brutal, the discussion felt barely better than in high school, and I went to a pretty marginal high school (the closest SAT score to mine was nearly 200 points lower). And I don't even think that I'm particularly smart for a Stanford grad!

So I think there's something else at work in admissions. I don't really know what it is. Then again, maybe those people who had me facepalming in IHUM really were brilliant at something, just not IHUM. I have no idea. I just don't really buy this idea that Stanford is composed of a bunch of really smart people and then some marginal athletes.

Oh, also, one thing about athletes is that they tend to be extraordinarily hard workers. I think that at a place like Stanford that counts more than a few hundred SAT points, or a few tenths of a point on a GPA. I'm completely certain that most football players get more out of their Stanford degree than I did, just because I'm lazy. I might have more natural intellectual aptitude (however measured) than nearly all of them, but knowing how to work matters more.



*I personally like this definition of intelligence because it's so broad and doesn't need to be restricted to language or math individually. I think it's also the way almost everyone intuitively judges the intelligence of others.

[stupac2]

Roughly speaking, to get admitted to Stanford you need both a GPA within ear-shot of perfect + 2200+ thee part SATs AND exceptional performance in something else ... plus some luck. I once heard this described by an admissions officer as needing "two excellences", i.e. academics plus something else.

If that were true I wouldn't be here. Still not sure exactly why I got in.

There are, at least from time to time, a few excellent musicians/artists/etc at Stanford that slip just a bit below the general standard on academics, but there are not 85+13 of them and they didn't slip to the sub-1100 two part SAT level.

There is a significant, difficult question in weighing what an individual athlete brings to campus in their combination of athletic and academic prowess. I don't know that Stanford always answers that question correctly, in fact there isn't an absolutely correct answer. I am happy in my belief that Stanford puts more care into addressing that question than most any other Division 1A school.
However, it's not reality to pretend that balancing act isn't going on and that athletic accomplishment in the money sports is really treated on an even level as other extra-activities.

I dunno about this. I met an awful lot of people at Stanford who weren't actually very visibly intelligent, by which I mean "able to process information and synthesize it into a coherent argument"*. Some of the discussion classes I took were absolutely brutal, the discussion felt barely better than in high school, and I went to a pretty marginal high school (the closest SAT score to mine was nearly 200 points lower). And I don't even think that I'm particularly smart for a Stanford grad!

So I think there's something else at work in admissions. I don't really know what it is. Then again, maybe those people who had me facepalming in IHUM really were brilliant at something, just not IHUM. I have no idea. I just don't really buy this idea that Stanford is composed of a bunch of really smart people and then some marginal athletes.

Oh, also, one thing about athletes is that they tend to be extraordinarily hard workers. I think that at a place like Stanford that counts more than a few hundred SAT points, or a few tenths of a point on a GPA. I'm completely certain that most football players get more out of their Stanford degree than I did, just because I'm lazy. I might have more natural intellectual aptitude (however measured) than nearly all of them, but knowing how to work matters more.



*I personally like this definition of intelligence because it's so broad and doesn't need to be restricted to language or math individually. I think it's also the way almost everyone intuitively judges the intelligence of others.