There is still enough snobbery present that people with “blotches on their record” need a significant amount of good luck in order not to be filtered out.
Well, the question is whether or not academic programs are good at selecting for talent (and, for the purposes of my point, I mean at the graduate level and above). So you may be right that it’s hard for people with blotches on their record to do well, but does this make the selection process a bad one, considered on the basis of costs to benefits?
Yes: there are excessive numbers of both false negatives (talented people with blotches) and false positives (untalented people without blotches).
I’ll make up an example (loosely based on some real cases I know about) to illustrate what I mean. Suppose a graduate admissions committee in a math or physics department is looking at two candidates. Candidate A is applying to transfer from another graduate program at another institution, where for some reason he was a total disaster, flunking courses left and right. On the other hand, his undergraduate record is near-perfect, and itself consists mostly of graduate-level courses. Candidate B, by contrast, is applying directly from undergraduate school, and has a reasonably good record, but with standard undergraduate coursework in the subject, nothing particularly beyond “grade level”.
Now, of these two candidates, which do you think has a higher chance of admission? Neither of them is ideal, of course; but let us stipulate that exactly one of them is in fact admitted. Who do you think it was?
If you were trying to select for talent, it would be Candidate A every time. And sure enough, there are people in math/physics academia who would indeed pick Candidate A. (This is an improvement over high school, or humanities academia, where no one would.) However, a disturbingly large number will pick Candidate B. They will see Candidate A as “damaged goods”, as “unworthy”—as if a spot in a graduate program were a reward for “good citizenship”, rather than a resource to be used for getting research problems solved.
Yes: there are excessive numbers of both false negatives (talented people with blotches) and false positives (untalented people without blotches).
Why do you think this?
Who do you think it was?
So I haven’t read your last paragraph yet. I guess if I were making the decision, I’d pick the undergraduate, unless the graduate transfer had some kind of story about what happened (a divorce, a death, something that would explain the failures). I think that’s probably how most admissions committees would go too: talent isn’t worth much if you need to be dragged to work every day. Now, on to your last paragraph...
(This is an improvement over high school, or humanities academia, where no one would.)
About humanities academia, this isn’t at all true.
I guess if I were making the decision, I’d pick the undergraduate, unless the graduate transfer had some kind of story about what happened (a divorce, a death, something that would explain the failures).
Well, of course there’s some kind of story that explains the failures, other than “he just wasn’t good enough”; by assumption the guy wasn’t let into the first graduate school off the street—he had been a brilliant undergraduate. So something went wrong. The question is whether you should filter out a clearly capable person because something went wrong once. If you do, you’re simply not optimizing for the right thing.
A rational deliberation on Candidate A would look like this: “This person obviously has issues, and he might not succeed here. But if he does, there’s a good chance he’ll succeed spectacularly -- at least, at a level above that of many students we’re happy to call ‘successful’. If he doesn’t, well, some percentage of the blemish-free students we admit are going to fail anyway, so what’s the difference?”
It is a fact of life that sometimes multiple iterations are required for something to work; but the school system does a poor job of accommodating this. Repeating a course as many times as necessary until you get an A is not something that the system encourages; if it were optimizing for the right things, it would be.
About humanities academia, this isn’t at all true
Yes, that was a flippant, stereotyped exaggeration—especially since “humanities” includes philosophy and linguistics, where the mentality is often very similar to math. Still, like any good caricature, it has some basis in reality. Generally speaking, the “softer” the subject -- the fewer objective measures of competence—the greater the reliance on pure status games, i.e. academic snobbery. And of course my whole point here is that this snobbery is present even in “hard” fields.
The question is whether you should filter out a clearly capable person because something went wrong once. If you do, you’re simply not optimizing for the right thing.
What I mean is that I’d want to hear the story. If the guy’s wife died, that’s one thing. If he got addicted to heroin, that’s another. If I’m given no story, then I’ll go with the undergrad. But I don’t disagree with the rest of your assessment.
Generally speaking, the “softer” the subject—the fewer objective measures of competence—the greater the reliance on pure status games, i.e. academic snobbery.
Well, the question is whether or not academic programs are good at selecting for talent (and, for the purposes of my point, I mean at the graduate level and above). So you may be right that it’s hard for people with blotches on their record to do well, but does this make the selection process a bad one, considered on the basis of costs to benefits?
Yes: there are excessive numbers of both false negatives (talented people with blotches) and false positives (untalented people without blotches).
I’ll make up an example (loosely based on some real cases I know about) to illustrate what I mean. Suppose a graduate admissions committee in a math or physics department is looking at two candidates. Candidate A is applying to transfer from another graduate program at another institution, where for some reason he was a total disaster, flunking courses left and right. On the other hand, his undergraduate record is near-perfect, and itself consists mostly of graduate-level courses. Candidate B, by contrast, is applying directly from undergraduate school, and has a reasonably good record, but with standard undergraduate coursework in the subject, nothing particularly beyond “grade level”.
Now, of these two candidates, which do you think has a higher chance of admission? Neither of them is ideal, of course; but let us stipulate that exactly one of them is in fact admitted. Who do you think it was?
If you were trying to select for talent, it would be Candidate A every time. And sure enough, there are people in math/physics academia who would indeed pick Candidate A. (This is an improvement over high school, or humanities academia, where no one would.) However, a disturbingly large number will pick Candidate B. They will see Candidate A as “damaged goods”, as “unworthy”—as if a spot in a graduate program were a reward for “good citizenship”, rather than a resource to be used for getting research problems solved.
Why do you think this?
So I haven’t read your last paragraph yet. I guess if I were making the decision, I’d pick the undergraduate, unless the graduate transfer had some kind of story about what happened (a divorce, a death, something that would explain the failures). I think that’s probably how most admissions committees would go too: talent isn’t worth much if you need to be dragged to work every day. Now, on to your last paragraph...
About humanities academia, this isn’t at all true.
Well, of course there’s some kind of story that explains the failures, other than “he just wasn’t good enough”; by assumption the guy wasn’t let into the first graduate school off the street—he had been a brilliant undergraduate. So something went wrong. The question is whether you should filter out a clearly capable person because something went wrong once. If you do, you’re simply not optimizing for the right thing.
A rational deliberation on Candidate A would look like this: “This person obviously has issues, and he might not succeed here. But if he does, there’s a good chance he’ll succeed spectacularly -- at least, at a level above that of many students we’re happy to call ‘successful’. If he doesn’t, well, some percentage of the blemish-free students we admit are going to fail anyway, so what’s the difference?”
It is a fact of life that sometimes multiple iterations are required for something to work; but the school system does a poor job of accommodating this. Repeating a course as many times as necessary until you get an A is not something that the system encourages; if it were optimizing for the right things, it would be.
Yes, that was a flippant, stereotyped exaggeration—especially since “humanities” includes philosophy and linguistics, where the mentality is often very similar to math. Still, like any good caricature, it has some basis in reality. Generally speaking, the “softer” the subject -- the fewer objective measures of competence—the greater the reliance on pure status games, i.e. academic snobbery. And of course my whole point here is that this snobbery is present even in “hard” fields.
What I mean is that I’d want to hear the story. If the guy’s wife died, that’s one thing. If he got addicted to heroin, that’s another. If I’m given no story, then I’ll go with the undergrad. But I don’t disagree with the rest of your assessment.
Fair enough.