Posted on 04/04/2018 7:10:51 AM PDT by BBell
A high school senior from Houston, Texas, was accepted by each of the 20 top-ranked universities to which he applied — and was offered a full scholarship to every single one of them.
Michael Brown, a 17-year-old student at Lamar High School, went viral after he was caught on camera screaming in glee upon learning he was accepted into Stanford University in December.
Little did the teen know at the time, but his excitement would increase by a factor of 20 in March when he was also accepted into Harvard, Princeton, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown, Northwestern, Vanderbilt and the University of Michigan, among other prestigious colleges.
But what did it take for Brown to pull off his flawless clean sweep?
To start, the high schooler has an impressive 4.68 grade point average and an SAT score of 1540 out of 1600. His ACT score, a 34 out of a possible 36, proved to be just as excellent.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
No, he’s not white. But it sounds like Lamar is an excellent school. Named after a slave owner and slave trader, though. Mirabeau Lamar died in 1859, so the school wasn’t renamed like those named after prominent Confederates were.
Now more and more instruction is available through the Internet, so the advantage of physically attending Harvard or Yale or Princeton may be purely social and career-oriented.
Interacting with smart students outside of classroom contexts has an intellectual value that transcends the “purely social.”
ALL classes vary significantly in quality. Regular, Honors, IB, AP or otherwise. You are arguing for the minority exception rather than the regular rule, which is a ridiculous way to analyze things as a whole. I'm all for posting AP exam scores on transcripts but most people are accepted BEFORE senior year is done which is when most people take AP classes anyway.
A basic 4.0 system has more missing pieces than a 5.0 or 6.0 system, period. A college can then layer on SAT scores + AP/IB scores to round out average GPA scores for an individual school.
The TLDR version - people obsessed with using only a 4.0 grew up largely when all classes were the same and grading was truly uniform.
Grade inflation. Extra credit.
I come from the before-time. I had a 3.91, and missed Valedictorian by 3/1000s grade point. Private Christian high school with prohibitively high standards when I started: 93-100 = A, etc. Much more objective and stringent grading. No possibility of exceeding 4.0, no matter how much extra credit one did! No A+s! (I often had perfect papers with 110 or 120% - it was still an A = 4.0.)
The first 4.0 overall GPA in my school’s history came two years after my graduation.
(I was a sickly nerd at the time. PE was my downfall.)
See my Post 105.
All classes were not the same in my day. Not everybody made it to Physics, not everybody made it to Calculus, the amount of foreign language taken varied greatly. English and the Social Sciences had had streams since at least the 60’s—and this was the back woods of Oregon. Some people took Physics and Calculus, some took Chorus. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the difference, and depending on your program, grades in one subject will be more relevant than grades in another.
And I sincerely doubt that grading was ever uniform.
If you don’t take AP classes before senior year, that says something. Unless things have changed, the last half of senior year counts for nothing anyway. A guy the year ahead of me got into Brown, and blew off the last chunk of his last semester to the point of not technically graduating—didn’t matter in the end. Of course, that’s Brown for you.
Yup - Great scores for certain and congrats to the kid. But a white kid would have only made it into 6-8 of those colleges, with a scholarship at maybe 1. An Asian kid would have made it into 2-4 of those colleges with 0 scholarships.
And while he wanted to go to Harvard, he ended up at U of Texas at Austin.
https://www.pbkhouston.org/lamar-high-school/
I had a similar close shave with being valedictorian—but what did me in was having goofed off in first semester Spanish freshman year. I was a point off of making an A, and to my eternal benefit, the teacher didn’t cut me any slack.
If you don’t take AP classes before senior year, that says something. Yes, its called average. Something most people forget.
Colleges adjust for your HS’s average grade, and I would bet money the first 4.0 was earlier than you think/know about.
If you’re average, you probably aren’t Harvard bound, looking at 1400+ SATs, pulling straight As, or competing for Valedictorian. That is the sort of person this thread purports to be about.
Somehow, and I’m only ten years ahead of you, the people in the top portion of the class were largely the ones who were significantly above average. Order might be gamed a bit by taking different loads, but no system is perfect, and if people care enough to go out of the way to advance themselves in something that is in someways imperfectly superficial, let them. My fellow co-salutatorian made it into Harvard—he gamed the system a bit to make himself more attractive to Harvard. If it floated his boat and he thought it worth the effort, who am I to complain.
And by the way—it was the back woods of Oregon—maybe 2 inches of rain or fog that required that someone walk in front of the bus, but almost never snow.
By the way, if you could explain the difference to me between Honors Calc and Calc, I’d be grateful. I think I’ve managed to decipher one creature that did not exist in my day—Pre-Calc. Pre=NOT
I’d bet you loose that bet. Institutions have long memories concerning best marks ever.
If you really need explanation of normal -> Honors -> AP/IB you arent' very smart. It's very simply average -> above average -> significantly above average.
Institutions yes - him,no.
PS 1400 SAT is barely noteworthy anymore. I had a 790 math scores in 8th grade...> 20 years ago in 8th grade.
The college board claims that it makes you better than 95% of the people who take the SAT—that would still be somewhat noteworthy. 1560 is well into the 99th percentile.
790 Math scores in 8th grade would make you a guy, statistically, and if you never cracked 1400—you’re probably an engineer. Was this after the days they introduced the you can miss one and still get an 800 system? That was after my time.
1) As online education catches on the possibilities for online students to interact with other smart students outside class will also increase.
2) If the movie The Social Network was at all accurate, you may be overestimating the value of student interaction at elite universities.
Most unfortunate ...
Online interaction is, in general, something akin to sticking nutrawsweet into a hummingbird feeder. Unfortunately, it is endemic. That said, saying that something will increase online interaction is always a negative—just a question of how big a negative (he said on free republic). Sometimes it does fill in for something that ought to be their but is in decline.
I haven’t seen The Social Network. I did get through Cornell in three years. I didn’t emerge with a bunch of friends that I’ll be calling on for the rest of my life, but I did interact with a whole bunch of smart people from all over in all sorts of way which gave me experience and insight to draw upon in subsequent years. This includes experiencing the weaknesses of smart people, no small thing.
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