Preface: I graduated from one of the top public high schools in Arizona and will be starting classes at Stanford in just a few weeks.
It’s been my experience that the overwhelming majority of AP / honors students (the top performers at a US high school) are more preoccupied with the signaling effects of any given activity than its immediate or long-term effects on human capital growth. In the AP classes in which I was involved, I’d estimate 50–75% of the students enrolled in the class not based on genuine interest but rather driven by the will to “be an AP student” or “have a good-looking transcript.” Even the majority of administrators and counselors focused on the signaling side of the equation, advising us to build rigorous schedules that “demonstrated” our academic persistence.
I avoided [1] classes, clubs and activities which were evidently abused for their signaling effects more than they were actually enjoyed. I was one of very few among the top 1% of my class who didn’t force themselves into AP US History, AP Chemistry, etc. These classes were not of immediate value or interest to me, so I simply didn’t take them. [2] I spent my time on more productive tasks that were of immediate utility and / or greatly increased my human capital: contracting as a web developer, studying foreign languages, linguistics, math, philosophy, … outside of school, and networking with developers online and in my city.
I can confirm after meeting fellow Stanford students and getting clear answers from admission officers that students can rarely, if ever, force themselves into a top-tier school with a strategy dominated by signaling. These schools [3] put an extreme amount of weight on essays. [4] Test scores and class load, areas which often earn the most focus from students, parents, and teachers, are all secondary to the image a student projects through his or her written responses.
Signaling should be far less central to a high school strategy than is currently the norm. Top-performing students need to realize that the surest way into a selective university is:
Search out a field, idea or problem that fascinates you. Forget about how “significant” or “impressive” this issue might look on paper to an admissions officer. In fact, forget about admissions altogether.
Pursue your own goals in this field relentlessly. If you like to knit, open an Etsy shop and start marketing or offering classes locally. If you like to cook, make your own YouTube cooking show or start a blog to publish your own recipes.
Write clearly and honestly about your achievements in your application essays. Remember to show, not tell: use your accomplishments as proof of your work ethic, ambition, etc., rather than expecting a reader to trust you. (Your English teachers will likely have advice on how to include lots of information about your achievements while avoiding outright bragging.)
tl;dr: “Follow your passion” is really true. Students should rarely engage in activities solely for the sake of signaling. Evidence of a true passion can show through in application essays, and will mean more than 10 club presidencies or 50 letters of recommendation. Rip out of the chains of high school and do something that you’re passionate about!
I’d highly recommend How to Be a High School Superstar for any current high schoolers. This book really changed my view on academics, and I’m not sure I would be at Stanford without it. (No affiliation, just a happy customer!)
Footnotes
Explicitly so, as an intentional strategy.
This earned me lots of confused looks over the years. People would ask, “Why aren’t you in APUSH?” as if the accelerated class were the default choice.
I speak for Stanford mostly, but I know (anecdotally) that schools of similar caliber have the same kind of philosophy regarding selection of students.
Stanford’s application had 10 writing prompts, 8 of which were short-answer (just a few sentences), carefully designed and refined over the years to suss out the real qualities of a student.
You’re speaking from anecdotal life experience. My anecdotal life experience tends to disagree with several of the points you have made.
I’m writing solely from the perspective of and about the top ~5% of a high school class. I assume that students taking the time to weigh the human capital growth prospects vs. the signaling benefits of an opportunity belong to this class
Bad assumption, even when only taking into account similar schools and demographics to the one you attended. I did make exactly this sort of cost-benefit calculation in high school and I was only above average and not close to the top 5% when it came to GPA. To avoid having you attribute this to low intelligence, I’ll also mention that I was in the top 1% when it came to standardized test scores. I attribute this to the fact that GPA primarily measures organization, conscientiousness, working memory,and signalling while test scores primarily measure English verbal and quantitative proficiency.
What I’m against is a student using signaling benefits as a deciding factor in any amount when selecting extracurriculars, classes, etc
I paid zero attention to signalling in high school. I’d engage in auto-didactic activities such as browsing google-scholar and reading stuff which interested me in favor of working on my assignments. I signed up for all of the most challenging classes because I knew that in the competition between regular course X and AP course X, the AP course would be more fun, more interesting, teach me more, and suck up roughly equal time. For the same amount of studying, a high level course will give you a lower grade but more knowledge. I didn’t even think about my GPA—I didn’t even bother keep track of how many points I had in my classes. I had a terribly single-minded focus on learning...because signalling was just too damn boring to bother with. To this day I still struggle to force myself into putting up adequately strong signalling, even when it’s dull. Not signalling adequately is akrasia, it is bad, don’t do it.
I was one of very few among the top 1% of my class who didn’t force themselves into AP US History, AP Chemistry
Right, but that means you took non-AP History and non-AP chemistry courses. You could have chosen to take the AP classes and simply spend the same amount of time studying for them as you would for the non-AP equivalent , and been content with a lower grade because you learned more about the material. If you weren’t signalling at all, why would you ever take a lower level course if you have the prerequisite knowledge to understand the higher course?
If it takes 5 hrs/wk to get an A in AP english and 2 hrs/wk to get an A in regular English, you can (but shouldn’t!) still just spend 2 hrs/wk on AP english, get a B-, and still learn more than you would have with an A in regular English.
Forget about how “significant” or “impressive” this issue might look on paper to an admissions officer.
So when I started college (due to my GPA, it was not a high-flying Ivy league) and started taking courses, when it came to the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and sociology I had already read much of the original research off of which the material was based. Some of the professors I encountered felt like celebrities because I had happened to read one of their papers once. Of course, this didn’t help me at all when it came to introductory courses where most of the material was memorization, but now that I’m taking upper level courses dealing with primary source material it’s finally beginning to pay off. But even now, those introductory courses are leeching my GPA, and are going to effect my graduate admissions process.
So lets return to high school: how exactly do I put: “For the past three years I’ve I spend hours every day reading primary literature and so I am intimately familiar with how science is done, but you’ll just have to take my word on that” on a transcript without sounding completely lame? That might fly in grad school interviews, but your average undergraduate admissions officer probably doesn’t understand why this is a really valuable and rare thing for a high school student to do. They’re thinking, “Yeah, my kid reads Scientific American too, big deal”. The fact that I won several science fairs, which should actually be the much less impressive accomplishment, probably helped my resume more than all my reading combined.
Evidence of a true passion can show through in application essays, and will mean more than 10 club presidencies or 50 letters of recommendation. Rip out of the chains of high school and do something that you’re passionate about!
So here’s what I see: You are someone who followed their passions and excelled in school, and you think doing well in school is about passion. I am someone who followed his passions and did above average in school (an underachiever relative to what IQ-proxy standardized tests expected), and I thought doing well in school was about signalling.
Here’s my updated conclusion after reading your story: some people have natural passions which take them in a direction that happens to cause good signalling—passions which cause them to succeed in school and get admitted into high level colleges. Such people like the system and tend to feel that its indicators are good and honest. Others have natural passions which take time away from signalling activities, and these people perceive a constant strain between signalling and passion. Such people tend to think that the system has perverse incentive structures.
I didn’t often connect this work with college admissions, however.
And that’s the crux of it. You did signal optimally, and the fact that you didn’t signal optimally on purpose doesn’t change that.
See, when your passions just happen lead to high GPA and good resumes, you don’t need conscientiousness-ly cultivated signalling behavior. This is why you are advising others to simply do what comes naturally.
For the rest of us - if you want to get into a high level university, I’d advise you to keep signalling, or switch into a different set of incentive structures (homeschooling, alternative schools, etc).
Some of the professors I encountered felt like celebrities because I had happened to read one of their papers once. Of course, this didn’t help me at all when it came to introductory courses where most of the material was memorization, but now that I’m taking upper level courses dealing with primary source material it’s finally beginning to pay off. But even now, those introductory courses are leeching my GPA, and are going to effect my graduate admissions process.
Admission to graduate school is easy to hack, especially if you know the people in the field. Decide now on a short list of people you’d like to be your advisor, and talk to your professors about them. Work your way up to emailing / calling them, but an introduction from a professor that likes you will go far. If a professor says “I want Ishaan to be my graduate student,” you will be admitted.
Seconded. This seemed outrageous and unthinkable to me before I was in grad school; now that I’ve been to grad school, I recognize it as obviously true.
Work your way up to emailing / calling them, but an introduction from a professor that likes you will go far.
Well-known professors get cold-emailed pretty frequently by prospective students, and are largely ignored. An introduction from a professor that likes you, in a related field of study, will get you pretty far.
Of course, you won’t get those introductions without having a professor that likes you; the easiest way to get a professor to like you is to demonstrate interest, and start to build expertise, in the field you want to do work in. Start reading papers, ask your professors questions about research, or just pointers to relevant research. If you want to do math or CS or theoretical X, make serious attempts at solving interesting problems. If you’re in a lab science, ask to help with relevant experiments at your university.
I did not do these things when I was an undergrad. Doing them would have made a serious difference; I’ve seen that difference in grad students since then. If you seriously want to do graduate research, this stuff is at least as important as your grades. It’s good practice and good signaling.
I wish to point out that the emphasis on “passion” as an admission criterion is destructive. Every high school student has heard that they have to show “passion” in something in order to get into a good college. The normal manifestation of this is not “I like knitting and will open an Etsy shop and teach classes.” It is “I liked band enough to stick with it for a couple years, and that’s an Activity, and I can write something convincing about my passion for it. Therefore I can’t quit band now that I’ve stopped liking it because then what would I look passionate about?” Same with volunteering, sports, etc.
Because “passion” was a mandatory signal, I had no idea it was ever real. It wasn’t until college that I realized for certain that there were people who were genuinely interested in anything.
Great point. I think my interpretation of the word in this context has drifted from the norm because I’ve built such a philosophy around it. How else can we describe the manifestation of “passion” that I wrote about? Is “focused ambition” any better of a way to name this?
“I liked band enough to stick with it for a couple years, and that’s an Activity, and I can write something convincing about my passion for it. Therefore I can’t quit band now that I’ve stopped liking it because then what would I look passionate about?”
Here’s a virtual high-five for capital-A “Activity.” This is the kind of thinking that guides otherwise brilliant students away from their ultimate potential.
Thanks for the thoughtful and detailed comment. I’d be interested in corresponding or speaking if you’d like — I can be reached at jsinick@gmail.com.
As a general disclaimer, I favor efficiency of discourse over tact, and so sometimes I inadvertently come across as dismissive — if I say anything that gives that impression, please don’t take it personally — it’s my default mode of operation, and doesn’t correspond to my having a negative assessment of my interlocutors. Some of my questions are in part rhetorical in nature, but I don’t intend them to carry connotations of the type “the answer to this question should be obvious.”
I was one of very few among the top 1% of my class who didn’t force themselves into AP US History, AP Chemistry, etc.
I would have thought that getting into the top 1% of a high school class would require at least some choices that compromised personal development for the sake of signaling. Did you never encounter such choices?
I can confirm after meeting fellow Stanford students and getting clear answers from admission officers that students can rarely, if ever, force themselves into a top-tier school with a strategy dominated by signaling.
Why do you think that the admissions officers were telling the truth?
What information did you get from your classmates that gave you this impression?
Test scores and class load, areas which often earn the most focus from students, parents, and teachers, are all secondary to the image a student projects through his or her written responses.
According to Stanford’s profile of the class of 2013, 7% of applicants who got a 4.0+ GPA were admitted, while only 1% of applicants with a GPA of ⇐ 3.7 were admitted. Under some weak assumptions, in order for this to be consistent with written responses playing the dominant role, the odds of people in the in the latter group having sufficiently good written responses would have to be 7x the odds of people in the former group. Do you believe that this is the case?
Signaling should be far less central to a high school strategy than is currently the norm. Top-performing students need to realize that the surest way into a selective university is:
Why do you think that high schoolers do what they do if it’s so poorly optimized for college admissions?
You’ll notice “efficiency of discourse” is not my strong suit with this topic. My apologies—I have a lot to blather about that has been held in for too long. I’ve bolded the occasional important phrase to help the LW-skimmers of the future parse through my dense stuff. :)
I should amend my preface before continuing: I’m writing solely from the perspective of and about the top ~5% of a high school class. I assume that students taking the time to weigh the human capital growth prospects vs. the signaling benefits of an opportunity belong to this class. Among this group you can expect to see something close to (if not exactly) 4.0 unweighted GPAs.
I would have thought that getting into the top 1% of a high school class would require at least some choices that compromised personal development for the sake of signaling. Did you never encounter such choices?
These choices came up many times over. It’s definitely tempting to seize at all opportunities that present themselves—I’d say the mere environment encourages such overinflated ambition. I’ve seen club advertisements and even heard teachers saying “It’ll look good on your resume” as a major benefit of a program. Obsessive concern over signaling is widespread among honors students, and it’s so common that they’ll blatantly capitalize on the idea when trying to market a new club or class.
I ignored this common concern in my own major decisions. I took non-honors Intro to Graphic Design and Intro to 3D Graphics classes where I could’ve fit in extra APs. I dropped cross country (a great activity to have on a resume) in my senior year in order to dedicate more time to my work (something that wouldn’t show up on a list of extracurriculars).
Within classes, of course, I had to make sacrifices for the Numbers (GPA and class rank). There was the occasional ridiculous English project I had to push myself through and chemistry lab I needed to rewrite. I didn’t often connect this work with college admissions, however. I retained some amount of loyalty to the Numbers just because I felt it was the high-utility thing to do. [1] Going through the motions on silly projects could often earn the respect of a teacher, a useful thing to have when times got tough.
Why do you think that the admissions officers were telling the truth?
Good question. The situation was one where there was little incentive to speak untruthfully: a group discussion between incoming students and a regional admission officer (who knew that we had all been accepted). Admittedly, there is a chance that the officer had to hold her tongue due to internal policy about sharing admission strategies.
What information did you get from your classmates that gave you this impression?
No student saw grades as a central factor in getting accepted (I asked this of quite a few people while I was there, as I’m curious about much the same things as you are!). Of course, this is low-quality anecdotal evidence at best. I don’t have anything more definitive to provide on this point.
According to Stanford’s profile of the class of 2013, 7% of applicants who got a 4.0+ GPA were admitted, while only 1% of applicants with a GPA of ⇐ 3.7 were admitted. Under some weak assumptions, in order for this to be consistent with written responses playing the dominant role, the odds of people in the in the latter group having sufficiently good written responses would have to be 7x the odds of people in the former group. Do you believe that this is the case?
I made a mistake in my previous post in not being clear enough about my scope. I mean to restrict the statements more in this post (see the first paragraph). The process I’ve built is likely to be useful to high-achieving students—the kind who are considering human capital growth prospect vs. signaling benefits, i.e., the kind that are likely already near a 4.0 GPA.
I don’t mean to discount high school academics entirely. It’s vitally important for a student to find subjects within the high-school curriculum which he / she enjoys and dedicate him/herself to them. What I’m against (and what is currently part of the norm for the top students, from what I’ve seen) is a student using signaling benefits as a deciding factor in any amount when selecting extracurriculars, classes, etc.
Why do you think that high schoolers do what they do if it’s so poorly optimized for college admissions?
I see it as a long-term case of the “Failure to Evaluate Return-on-Time” fallacy. There might be a better name for this, or I might be using the wrong idea altogether—let me explain. (Forgive me for the imprecision… I’m new to contributing to this wonderful site.)
High school counselors often give presentations to 8th-graders at local middle schools and freshmen at their own schools. They describe the process of college admission and the various steps that need to be taken over four years at a high school. They often also present “strategies” for building up an impressive resume / transcript. Most, if not all, of the options provided in these strategies involve school-run programs: advanced classes, clubs, special STEM activities, and so on.
It’s very easy to build a cozy box using all the opportunities offered. I might call this planning a “bounded ambition.” Students measure their success and the success of others [2] by how many activities they can take on and how well they can do within those activities. Over time, their real passions are clouded over by the idea of taking that extra course, of joining that extra club.
I feel I’m getting ranty and too aggressive in my statements once again. I’ll sign off for now.
[1]: Admitted possibility of post-hoc rationalization here.
[2]: Competition between students is a huge issue at this level and undoubtedly plays a role in making signaling effects more attractive than human capital effects. Gosh, we could write a whole book on this stuff.
I feel as though this is a conversation stopper. Two issues:
The claim is vague, and it’s not clear what it means. Using it in a given instance without elaboration paints in overly broad brush strokes, with insufficient specificity to be falsifiable, serving as a fully general argument.
This can be used as a conversation stopper and to maintain balance I suggest we also must acknowledge that forbidding it or dismissing it entirely would also be conversation stopper, just one that results in a different conclusion.
The archetypical case where this statement is used is where the context is of the form:
A) A significant group of people do this thing.
B) [implied] If a significant group of people do a thing then it is very likely that it is rational for them to do that thing.
C) [implied] Therefore, it is rational to do this thing.
If there is disagreement about the degree to which premise B is true then it is useful to express that disagreement (to whatever extent that such discussions are useful in the first place). If an unresolvable disagreement about B is discovered then the immediate conversation can be considered to be successful. That is, agreement may be reached that given the premises held the participants are correctly reasoning about the immediate subject and agree that if they had the other’s premise they would have the other’s conclusion. Further argument about the immediate subject is not needed.
The claim is vague, and it’s not clear what it means.
If you consider the claim to be a compressed expression of the claim that B, above, does not hold then hopefully the claim is clear to you. You may still disagree but vagueness claim no longer applies. I do agree that there are surely better ways for Eliezer to express this position than the rather provocative catch phrase that he has adopted.
I would essentially agree with this but refine that the real two competing theses are procedural about what we should do at point B in the argument:
Rule B1: If a significant group of people do a thing, then this in itself may be brought up as evidence that the thing may perhaps be rational, it is not necessary to further develop a thesis about how this group is reasoning correctly. A special thesis may be brought that on this occasion, people are acting irrationally, but this is burdensome and never quite believable with confidence except with the most extreme evidence.
Rule B2: If a significant group of people do a thing, this is an interesting observation, but there are many reasons why people do things, and to feel a slight sense of nervousness at departing their behavior pattern is leftover hunter-gatherer instinct which would poorly serve many of us now. To suppose that the group is acting rationally is a significant and unimplied further statement, which should not be made without specific supporting evidence especially if there seems to be a countervailing object-level argument.
(Hidden incentives which explain why people do what they do are commonplace, but unconscious reasoning will rarely add up to long-term rationality with respect to the original goal criterion being considered. It is both ‘cleverness’ and great implausibility to construct some elaborate pattern of secret knowledge which no one ever speaks explicitly, and Machiavellianness, and unusual personal goals or redefinitions of success, whereby the apparently stupid becomes smart.)
Object level arguments aside, people engaging in behavior A is still nontrivial evidence that behavior A is rational. Sure, it may be weak evidence, and can easily be swamped by object level arguments, but it can’t be entirely discarded.
The dichotomy Rule B1 vs. Rule B2 is a false dichotomy – one can be pretty confident that people are acting irrationally in a given instance even when one isn’t extremely confident, etc.
I meant to suggest that people’s behavior is one countervailing consideration against the position that demanding courseload & grades don’t matter much at the upper echelons, not that it’s very likely that they’re doing the rational thing.
Your English teachers may be bleeping awful. Go to your library and obtain worn-looking books on how-to-write which have been authored by successful authors. (Beware that how-to-write books in the used bookstore may have been passed on for a reason; check to see if they were written by English teachers.)
“How to write” books are often an awful mess of superstitious prescriptivism. To be fair, the people reading your essays may have also read these books, and in this case it’s good to know that they may look down on you for splitting infinitives, ending sentences with prepositions, and using various other perfectly fine English constructions that someone a hundred years ago decided were ungrammatical because they don’t work in Latin. (See Language Log for some informative rants on this subject.) There’s good stuff out there, but don’t count on finding it easily.
If you want to learn to write well, (1) read a lot of fiction by successful authors (good writing style affects success more there than it does in, e.g., the sciences) and (2) write a lot, preferably in a forum where your writing will be read and criticized frequently.
In particular, the fiction of Isaac Asimov has done a lot to improve my writing. His writing (both fiction and nonfiction) is perfectly clear and transparent, to the point that you don’t even notice there is a style. Even if this isn’t the kind of writing you’re really interested in, I think everyone should have this style in their repertoire.
Hmm, I wonder if there are any stats on how applying the book’s advice affects a) acceptance rate and b) popularity. a) is hard to measure, but b) should be easy: take a few bestsellers vs a few random published books and see how severely the advice is violated and whether the bestsellers are better at compliance.
Presumably a) could be measured via the same techniques by comparing a sample of a publishing house’s published books with a sample of their rejected manuscripts.
Preface: I graduated from one of the top public high schools in Arizona and will be starting classes at Stanford in just a few weeks.
It’s been my experience that the overwhelming majority of AP / honors students (the top performers at a US high school) are more preoccupied with the signaling effects of any given activity than its immediate or long-term effects on human capital growth. In the AP classes in which I was involved, I’d estimate 50–75% of the students enrolled in the class not based on genuine interest but rather driven by the will to “be an AP student” or “have a good-looking transcript.” Even the majority of administrators and counselors focused on the signaling side of the equation, advising us to build rigorous schedules that “demonstrated” our academic persistence.
I avoided [1] classes, clubs and activities which were evidently abused for their signaling effects more than they were actually enjoyed. I was one of very few among the top 1% of my class who didn’t force themselves into AP US History, AP Chemistry, etc. These classes were not of immediate value or interest to me, so I simply didn’t take them. [2] I spent my time on more productive tasks that were of immediate utility and / or greatly increased my human capital: contracting as a web developer, studying foreign languages, linguistics, math, philosophy, … outside of school, and networking with developers online and in my city.
I can confirm after meeting fellow Stanford students and getting clear answers from admission officers that students can rarely, if ever, force themselves into a top-tier school with a strategy dominated by signaling. These schools [3] put an extreme amount of weight on essays. [4] Test scores and class load, areas which often earn the most focus from students, parents, and teachers, are all secondary to the image a student projects through his or her written responses.
Signaling should be far less central to a high school strategy than is currently the norm. Top-performing students need to realize that the surest way into a selective university is:
Search out a field, idea or problem that fascinates you. Forget about how “significant” or “impressive” this issue might look on paper to an admissions officer. In fact, forget about admissions altogether.
Pursue your own goals in this field relentlessly. If you like to knit, open an Etsy shop and start marketing or offering classes locally. If you like to cook, make your own YouTube cooking show or start a blog to publish your own recipes.
Write clearly and honestly about your achievements in your application essays. Remember to show, not tell: use your accomplishments as proof of your work ethic, ambition, etc., rather than expecting a reader to trust you. (Your English teachers will likely have advice on how to include lots of information about your achievements while avoiding outright bragging.)
tl;dr: “Follow your passion” is really true. Students should rarely engage in activities solely for the sake of signaling. Evidence of a true passion can show through in application essays, and will mean more than 10 club presidencies or 50 letters of recommendation. Rip out of the chains of high school and do something that you’re passionate about!
I’d highly recommend How to Be a High School Superstar for any current high schoolers. This book really changed my view on academics, and I’m not sure I would be at Stanford without it. (No affiliation, just a happy customer!)
Footnotes
Explicitly so, as an intentional strategy.
This earned me lots of confused looks over the years. People would ask, “Why aren’t you in APUSH?” as if the accelerated class were the default choice.
I speak for Stanford mostly, but I know (anecdotally) that schools of similar caliber have the same kind of philosophy regarding selection of students.
Stanford’s application had 10 writing prompts, 8 of which were short-answer (just a few sentences), carefully designed and refined over the years to suss out the real qualities of a student.
You’re speaking from anecdotal life experience. My anecdotal life experience tends to disagree with several of the points you have made.
Bad assumption, even when only taking into account similar schools and demographics to the one you attended. I did make exactly this sort of cost-benefit calculation in high school and I was only above average and not close to the top 5% when it came to GPA. To avoid having you attribute this to low intelligence, I’ll also mention that I was in the top 1% when it came to standardized test scores. I attribute this to the fact that GPA primarily measures organization, conscientiousness, working memory,and signalling while test scores primarily measure English verbal and quantitative proficiency.
I paid zero attention to signalling in high school. I’d engage in auto-didactic activities such as browsing google-scholar and reading stuff which interested me in favor of working on my assignments. I signed up for all of the most challenging classes because I knew that in the competition between regular course X and AP course X, the AP course would be more fun, more interesting, teach me more, and suck up roughly equal time. For the same amount of studying, a high level course will give you a lower grade but more knowledge. I didn’t even think about my GPA—I didn’t even bother keep track of how many points I had in my classes. I had a terribly single-minded focus on learning...because signalling was just too damn boring to bother with. To this day I still struggle to force myself into putting up adequately strong signalling, even when it’s dull. Not signalling adequately is akrasia, it is bad, don’t do it.
Right, but that means you took non-AP History and non-AP chemistry courses. You could have chosen to take the AP classes and simply spend the same amount of time studying for them as you would for the non-AP equivalent , and been content with a lower grade because you learned more about the material. If you weren’t signalling at all, why would you ever take a lower level course if you have the prerequisite knowledge to understand the higher course?
If it takes 5 hrs/wk to get an A in AP english and 2 hrs/wk to get an A in regular English, you can (but shouldn’t!) still just spend 2 hrs/wk on AP english, get a B-, and still learn more than you would have with an A in regular English.
So when I started college (due to my GPA, it was not a high-flying Ivy league) and started taking courses, when it came to the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and sociology I had already read much of the original research off of which the material was based. Some of the professors I encountered felt like celebrities because I had happened to read one of their papers once. Of course, this didn’t help me at all when it came to introductory courses where most of the material was memorization, but now that I’m taking upper level courses dealing with primary source material it’s finally beginning to pay off. But even now, those introductory courses are leeching my GPA, and are going to effect my graduate admissions process.
So lets return to high school: how exactly do I put: “For the past three years I’ve I spend hours every day reading primary literature and so I am intimately familiar with how science is done, but you’ll just have to take my word on that” on a transcript without sounding completely lame? That might fly in grad school interviews, but your average undergraduate admissions officer probably doesn’t understand why this is a really valuable and rare thing for a high school student to do. They’re thinking, “Yeah, my kid reads Scientific American too, big deal”. The fact that I won several science fairs, which should actually be the much less impressive accomplishment, probably helped my resume more than all my reading combined.
So here’s what I see: You are someone who followed their passions and excelled in school, and you think doing well in school is about passion. I am someone who followed his passions and did above average in school (an underachiever relative to what IQ-proxy standardized tests expected), and I thought doing well in school was about signalling.
Here’s my updated conclusion after reading your story: some people have natural passions which take them in a direction that happens to cause good signalling—passions which cause them to succeed in school and get admitted into high level colleges. Such people like the system and tend to feel that its indicators are good and honest. Others have natural passions which take time away from signalling activities, and these people perceive a constant strain between signalling and passion. Such people tend to think that the system has perverse incentive structures.
And that’s the crux of it. You did signal optimally, and the fact that you didn’t signal optimally on purpose doesn’t change that.
See, when your passions just happen lead to high GPA and good resumes, you don’t need conscientiousness-ly cultivated signalling behavior. This is why you are advising others to simply do what comes naturally.
For the rest of us - if you want to get into a high level university, I’d advise you to keep signalling, or switch into a different set of incentive structures (homeschooling, alternative schools, etc).
Admission to graduate school is easy to hack, especially if you know the people in the field. Decide now on a short list of people you’d like to be your advisor, and talk to your professors about them. Work your way up to emailing / calling them, but an introduction from a professor that likes you will go far. If a professor says “I want Ishaan to be my graduate student,” you will be admitted.
Seconded. This seemed outrageous and unthinkable to me before I was in grad school; now that I’ve been to grad school, I recognize it as obviously true.
Well-known professors get cold-emailed pretty frequently by prospective students, and are largely ignored. An introduction from a professor that likes you, in a related field of study, will get you pretty far.
Of course, you won’t get those introductions without having a professor that likes you; the easiest way to get a professor to like you is to demonstrate interest, and start to build expertise, in the field you want to do work in. Start reading papers, ask your professors questions about research, or just pointers to relevant research. If you want to do math or CS or theoretical X, make serious attempts at solving interesting problems. If you’re in a lab science, ask to help with relevant experiments at your university.
I did not do these things when I was an undergrad. Doing them would have made a serious difference; I’ve seen that difference in grad students since then. If you seriously want to do graduate research, this stuff is at least as important as your grades. It’s good practice and good signaling.
I wish to point out that the emphasis on “passion” as an admission criterion is destructive. Every high school student has heard that they have to show “passion” in something in order to get into a good college. The normal manifestation of this is not “I like knitting and will open an Etsy shop and teach classes.” It is “I liked band enough to stick with it for a couple years, and that’s an Activity, and I can write something convincing about my passion for it. Therefore I can’t quit band now that I’ve stopped liking it because then what would I look passionate about?” Same with volunteering, sports, etc.
Because “passion” was a mandatory signal, I had no idea it was ever real. It wasn’t until college that I realized for certain that there were people who were genuinely interested in anything.
Great point. I think my interpretation of the word in this context has drifted from the norm because I’ve built such a philosophy around it. How else can we describe the manifestation of “passion” that I wrote about? Is “focused ambition” any better of a way to name this?
Here’s a virtual high-five for capital-A “Activity.” This is the kind of thinking that guides otherwise brilliant students away from their ultimate potential.
Thanks for the thoughtful and detailed comment. I’d be interested in corresponding or speaking if you’d like — I can be reached at jsinick@gmail.com.
As a general disclaimer, I favor efficiency of discourse over tact, and so sometimes I inadvertently come across as dismissive — if I say anything that gives that impression, please don’t take it personally — it’s my default mode of operation, and doesn’t correspond to my having a negative assessment of my interlocutors. Some of my questions are in part rhetorical in nature, but I don’t intend them to carry connotations of the type “the answer to this question should be obvious.”
I would have thought that getting into the top 1% of a high school class would require at least some choices that compromised personal development for the sake of signaling. Did you never encounter such choices?
Why do you think that the admissions officers were telling the truth?
What information did you get from your classmates that gave you this impression?
According to Stanford’s profile of the class of 2013, 7% of applicants who got a 4.0+ GPA were admitted, while only 1% of applicants with a GPA of ⇐ 3.7 were admitted. Under some weak assumptions, in order for this to be consistent with written responses playing the dominant role, the odds of people in the in the latter group having sufficiently good written responses would have to be 7x the odds of people in the former group. Do you believe that this is the case?
Why do you think that high schoolers do what they do if it’s so poorly optimized for college admissions?
You’ll notice “efficiency of discourse” is not my strong suit with this topic. My apologies—I have a lot to blather about that has been held in for too long. I’ve bolded the occasional important phrase to help the LW-skimmers of the future parse through my dense stuff. :)
I should amend my preface before continuing: I’m writing solely from the perspective of and about the top ~5% of a high school class. I assume that students taking the time to weigh the human capital growth prospects vs. the signaling benefits of an opportunity belong to this class. Among this group you can expect to see something close to (if not exactly) 4.0 unweighted GPAs.
These choices came up many times over. It’s definitely tempting to seize at all opportunities that present themselves—I’d say the mere environment encourages such overinflated ambition. I’ve seen club advertisements and even heard teachers saying “It’ll look good on your resume” as a major benefit of a program. Obsessive concern over signaling is widespread among honors students, and it’s so common that they’ll blatantly capitalize on the idea when trying to market a new club or class.
I ignored this common concern in my own major decisions. I took non-honors Intro to Graphic Design and Intro to 3D Graphics classes where I could’ve fit in extra APs. I dropped cross country (a great activity to have on a resume) in my senior year in order to dedicate more time to my work (something that wouldn’t show up on a list of extracurriculars).
Within classes, of course, I had to make sacrifices for the Numbers (GPA and class rank). There was the occasional ridiculous English project I had to push myself through and chemistry lab I needed to rewrite. I didn’t often connect this work with college admissions, however. I retained some amount of loyalty to the Numbers just because I felt it was the high-utility thing to do. [1] Going through the motions on silly projects could often earn the respect of a teacher, a useful thing to have when times got tough.
Good question. The situation was one where there was little incentive to speak untruthfully: a group discussion between incoming students and a regional admission officer (who knew that we had all been accepted). Admittedly, there is a chance that the officer had to hold her tongue due to internal policy about sharing admission strategies.
No student saw grades as a central factor in getting accepted (I asked this of quite a few people while I was there, as I’m curious about much the same things as you are!). Of course, this is low-quality anecdotal evidence at best. I don’t have anything more definitive to provide on this point.
I made a mistake in my previous post in not being clear enough about my scope. I mean to restrict the statements more in this post (see the first paragraph). The process I’ve built is likely to be useful to high-achieving students—the kind who are considering human capital growth prospect vs. signaling benefits, i.e., the kind that are likely already near a 4.0 GPA.
I don’t mean to discount high school academics entirely. It’s vitally important for a student to find subjects within the high-school curriculum which he / she enjoys and dedicate him/herself to them. What I’m against (and what is currently part of the norm for the top students, from what I’ve seen) is a student using signaling benefits as a deciding factor in any amount when selecting extracurriculars, classes, etc.
I see it as a long-term case of the “Failure to Evaluate Return-on-Time” fallacy. There might be a better name for this, or I might be using the wrong idea altogether—let me explain. (Forgive me for the imprecision… I’m new to contributing to this wonderful site.)
High school counselors often give presentations to 8th-graders at local middle schools and freshmen at their own schools. They describe the process of college admission and the various steps that need to be taken over four years at a high school. They often also present “strategies” for building up an impressive resume / transcript. Most, if not all, of the options provided in these strategies involve school-run programs: advanced classes, clubs, special STEM activities, and so on.
It’s very easy to build a cozy box using all the opportunities offered. I might call this planning a “bounded ambition.” Students measure their success and the success of others [2] by how many activities they can take on and how well they can do within those activities. Over time, their real passions are clouded over by the idea of taking that extra course, of joining that extra club.
I feel I’m getting ranty and too aggressive in my statements once again. I’ll sign off for now.
[1]: Admitted possibility of post-hoc rationalization here.
[2]: Competition between students is a huge issue at this level and undoubtedly plays a role in making signaling effects more attractive than human capital effects. Gosh, we could write a whole book on this stuff.
I affirm your wise decision not to be much moved by the force of this question—People Are Crazy, The World Is Mad.
I feel as though this is a conversation stopper. Two issues:
The claim is vague, and it’s not clear what it means. Using it in a given instance without elaboration paints in overly broad brush strokes, with insufficient specificity to be falsifiable, serving as a fully general argument.
It would be helpful if you said more about why you hold your view. I haven’t seen you respond to Carl’s question: “What are some of the major predictive successes of “the world is mad” that held up under careful investigation of dispositive facts?” aside from appealing to the one example of physicists’ views on interpretations of quantum mechanics, where you haven’t substantiated your position by systematically examining and refuting sophisticates’ arguments against multiple worlds.
This can be used as a conversation stopper and to maintain balance I suggest we also must acknowledge that forbidding it or dismissing it entirely would also be conversation stopper, just one that results in a different conclusion.
The archetypical case where this statement is used is where the context is of the form:
A) A significant group of people do this thing.
B) [implied] If a significant group of people do a thing then it is very likely that it is rational for them to do that thing.
C) [implied] Therefore, it is rational to do this thing.
If there is disagreement about the degree to which premise B is true then it is useful to express that disagreement (to whatever extent that such discussions are useful in the first place). If an unresolvable disagreement about B is discovered then the immediate conversation can be considered to be successful. That is, agreement may be reached that given the premises held the participants are correctly reasoning about the immediate subject and agree that if they had the other’s premise they would have the other’s conclusion. Further argument about the immediate subject is not needed.
If you consider the claim to be a compressed expression of the claim that B, above, does not hold then hopefully the claim is clear to you. You may still disagree but vagueness claim no longer applies. I do agree that there are surely better ways for Eliezer to express this position than the rather provocative catch phrase that he has adopted.
I would essentially agree with this but refine that the real two competing theses are procedural about what we should do at point B in the argument:
Rule B1: If a significant group of people do a thing, then this in itself may be brought up as evidence that the thing may perhaps be rational, it is not necessary to further develop a thesis about how this group is reasoning correctly. A special thesis may be brought that on this occasion, people are acting irrationally, but this is burdensome and never quite believable with confidence except with the most extreme evidence.
Rule B2: If a significant group of people do a thing, this is an interesting observation, but there are many reasons why people do things, and to feel a slight sense of nervousness at departing their behavior pattern is leftover hunter-gatherer instinct which would poorly serve many of us now. To suppose that the group is acting rationally is a significant and unimplied further statement, which should not be made without specific supporting evidence especially if there seems to be a countervailing object-level argument.
(Hidden incentives which explain why people do what they do are commonplace, but unconscious reasoning will rarely add up to long-term rationality with respect to the original goal criterion being considered. It is both ‘cleverness’ and great implausibility to construct some elaborate pattern of secret knowledge which no one ever speaks explicitly, and Machiavellianness, and unusual personal goals or redefinitions of success, whereby the apparently stupid becomes smart.)
Object level arguments aside, people engaging in behavior A is still nontrivial evidence that behavior A is rational. Sure, it may be weak evidence, and can easily be swamped by object level arguments, but it can’t be entirely discarded.
The dichotomy Rule B1 vs. Rule B2 is a false dichotomy – one can be pretty confident that people are acting irrationally in a given instance even when one isn’t extremely confident, etc.
Strong evidence or it didn’t happen.
That is my default reaction to this concept, having seen it so often on LW applied to unmeasurably small wisps of evidence.
Compare But There’s Still A Chance, Right?. “But It’s Still Evidence, Right?” is the other side of that dud coin.
I meant to suggest that people’s behavior is one countervailing consideration against the position that demanding courseload & grades don’t matter much at the upper echelons, not that it’s very likely that they’re doing the rational thing.
Your English teachers may be bleeping awful. Go to your library and obtain worn-looking books on how-to-write which have been authored by successful authors. (Beware that how-to-write books in the used bookstore may have been passed on for a reason; check to see if they were written by English teachers.)
“How to write” books are often an awful mess of superstitious prescriptivism. To be fair, the people reading your essays may have also read these books, and in this case it’s good to know that they may look down on you for splitting infinitives, ending sentences with prepositions, and using various other perfectly fine English constructions that someone a hundred years ago decided were ungrammatical because they don’t work in Latin. (See Language Log for some informative rants on this subject.) There’s good stuff out there, but don’t count on finding it easily.
If you want to learn to write well, (1) read a lot of fiction by successful authors (good writing style affects success more there than it does in, e.g., the sciences) and (2) write a lot, preferably in a forum where your writing will be read and criticized frequently.
In particular, the fiction of Isaac Asimov has done a lot to improve my writing. His writing (both fiction and nonfiction) is perfectly clear and transparent, to the point that you don’t even notice there is a style. Even if this isn’t the kind of writing you’re really interested in, I think everyone should have this style in their repertoire.
I’ve only encountered one such, many books which repeated each other though usefully to the novice, and a few books which are excellent.
Any particular recommendations?
Currently reading this one, it’s pretty good: http://www.amazon.com/Self-Editing-Fiction-Writers-Second-ebook/dp/B003JBI2YI/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1378421718&sr=8-2&keywords=self-editing+for+fiction
It’s not a basic book for new writers, though, as one might guess; I like it because it has some very low-level advice not contained in other books.
Hmm, I wonder if there are any stats on how applying the book’s advice affects a) acceptance rate and b) popularity. a) is hard to measure, but b) should be easy: take a few bestsellers vs a few random published books and see how severely the advice is violated and whether the bestsellers are better at compliance.
Presumably a) could be measured via the same techniques by comparing a sample of a publishing house’s published books with a sample of their rejected manuscripts.
RIght, if the latter were easily accessible. Besides, most of the rejects are probably terrible in other ways, masking the issue.
That looks really interesting! I’d been thinking of Strunk and White and the like when I wrote my comment.