Reply to A reality check on "strong extracurriculars"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There is no evidence that Harvard still uses the rubric being quoted here.  It comes from the Harvard admissions lawsuit, and the most recent admissions data from that lawsuit is from 2015, or more than a decade ago.  Might as well have been a decade ago given how much admissions has changed since then.[/quote]

There are many kids who are rated a 4 in athletics (or whatever the lowest rating is) and they get into Harvard. These are kids who don't have any sports listed in their application. 
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But it was a disadvantage, obviously.  Again, this metric is over a decade old and predates the reversal of affirmative action.  We are speaking historically.[/quote]

It’s not a disadvantage at all and these are kids from the last couple of cycles. Their videos reading their files are all
over YouTube. They have the lowest athletic rating, and they all say it didn’t count towards their final rating. [/quote]

Np. My kid is at Harvard. Viewed admissions file. Had a 4 for athletic rating. 1s and 2s for the other categories ( academic, EC and personal). Athletics had zero impact for overall rating in this case. 
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You are right, Harvard just does not factor athletics if kid does not play sports. It does not have any impact on admissions. Dont play a sport if you have other things to do.[/quote]

This is absolutely wrong. In Harvard's own words:

[b]Non-academic skills are scarce:[/b]

Applicants with a rating of 2 or better on at least three dimensions are even rarer—just 7% of the applicant pool. These data indicate that high ratings on non-academic dimensions (and particularly on multiple non-academic dimensions) distinguish applicants in the pool much more effectively than a high academic rating”

[b]Non-academic skills explain admissions decisions better than academic skills:[/b]

“Another way to see the importance of non-academic dimensions relative to academic dimensions of excellence is to examine how important each element is in explaining which applicants are admitted…. In Prof. Arcidiacono’s expanded sample, the Pseudo RSquared of a model that includes only the academic rating as a control variable is 0.09, while the Pseudo R-Squared of models that include each of the three non-academic ratings as the sole control variables are 0.20 (personal), 0.09 (extracurricular), and 0.08 (athletic), and the Pseudo R-Squared for a model that includes all three non-academic ratings as control variables is 0.32."

The athletic rating explains virtually as much admissions variation as the extracurricular rating does.

[b]Being multi-dimensional is important:[/b]

“Exhibit 6 shows that only 12% of admitted students are “one-dimensional stars” with a rating of 1 on one dimension but fewer than three ratings of 2 or better, while 46% are multi-dimensional applicants with three or four ratings of 2 or better, and 31% have two ratings of 2 and two ratings of 3. These statistics are yet another way to show the value that Harvard places on applicants who distinguish themselves on multiple dimensions.”

And the clincher:

[b]Athletic rating is important:[/b]
 
“Harvard’s admissions data confirm the importance of the athletic rating. For example, [b]applicants with an athletic rating of 2 have an admission rate of 12%. That is substantially higher than the overall admission rate of approximately 7%, [for domestic applicants], and is the same as the admission rate of applicants with an academic rating of 2.[/b] Further, as shown above, receiving a rating of 2 on all four profile ratings is associated with an admission rate of 68%, while receiving a rating of 2 on the three non-athletic ratings and a rating of 3 or worse on the athletic rating is associated with an admission rate of only 48%. [b]This contrast provides further evidence of the incremental importance of an athletic rating of 2”[/b]

This comes straight from Harvard. Now explain to us exactly why Harvard is wrong.

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