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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don't have a problem.  I think it's great that a board at an institution who has been successful for 400 years is asking the questions.    [/quote]
You still haven't provided a link proving that it is asking questions.[/quote]

+1. This is my question as well. I'd be shocked if anyone on Harvard's board is agitating for these "improvements."[/quote]

Since OP seems unable to make google work, I did the legwork for her/him. Here is a very interesting article on this issue:

http://harvardmagazine.com/2016/01/overseers-petitioners-challenge-harvard-policies

The candidates for Board of Overseers and their personal statements (those nominated by petition are at the bottom):

http://www.harvard.edu/candidates-for-board-overseers

[/quote]

From the Harvard Magazine article:

[i]THE COLLEGE BOARD, academic analysts generally, and Harvard admissions officers have indicated that [b]SAT scores are predictive of students’ possible performance during their first undergraduate year, but not beyond.[/b] In fact, [b]dueling studies, including one just released, question whether the SAT even predicts one year of performance reliably. [/b]Presumably, evidence from PSAT tests, taken earlier in high school, has no stronger predictive value. And as noted, access to tutoring may have some influence on scores.

[b]Harvard College’s admissions announcements have regularly noted that thousands more applicants than can be admitted to an entering class are at the top tier of various single-point measurements. For the class of 2010, for example, nearly 2,600 applicants achieved a perfect (800) score on the SAT’s verbal test, and 2,700 achieved that score on the math section: more than 10 percent of that year’s applicant cohort. (In recent years, the College has published SAT scores by the number of applicants exceeding 700 on the verbal, math, and writing sections: more than 10,000 in each category each year.) And applicants to the class of 2018 included 3,400 high-school valedictorians: one-tenth of those in the applicant pool, more than double the number of those eventually enrolled in the class—and down from the 3,800 valedictorians in the pool of applicants for the class of 2016.[/b]

Unz took note of the latter phenomenon in his 2012 essay, observing that “Harvard could obviously fill its entire class with high-scoring valedictorians or National Merit Scholars but chooses not to do so. In 2003, Harvard rejected well over half of all applicants with perfect SAT scores, up from rejecting a quarter a few years earlier….” (He did not address the possibility that the increase in rejections reflected rising applicant numbers.)

[b]During an extended telephone conversation from Palo Alto on January 22, Unz was asked what he thought ideal admissions criteria and procedures might be, in pursuit of his preferred meritocratic process.

Unz responded that his ideal criteria were “not entirely clear,” [/b] and reiterated his call for “greater transparency” about admissions. The Golden book, he said, was a “horrifying” view of admissions, and his own analyses of admissions “shocked” him, making him “much, much more supportive of a much more meritocratic admissions” system focused on academic ability and performance. Evaluations based on determining “has this person been involved in that project, [and] all these essays,” in contrast, presented “tremendous opportunities for outright corruption.” [b]In search of a system focused on his preferred academic criteria, he had suggested his “thought experiment” about randomizing much of the decisionmaking about most of the applicant pool.[/b][/i]

IOW, Harvard should be using Unz's preferred criteria (I guess because his preferences are somehow the correct ones), but he really doesn't have any notions of how to build a better mouse trap. He just has "thought experiments."[/quote]

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