[sarah180]

A better way to think about it is that grades and test scores are probably not enough if you want to get into an elite school. Universities want interesting people who will enrich the campus and their fellow students.

One easy way to demonstrate this is through extracurricular activity. If you founded a club, excelled in a sport, engaged in charity, won contests, etc., that's a sign that you're somebody who does things in a community and not just a test taker.

(There is room at even top schools for test takers—but you're going to need extremely uncommon scores to stand out that way.)

[AQuantized]

This seems like an good way to get people to contrive as many experiences as possible for this relatively arbitrary metric. To me it seems totally irrelevant, but it seems like American universities are more of a packaged 'experience' than for specialized training specifically.

[laurent92]

I call this, dictatorship of the masses. Masses define « normal » as doing specific things, and normality is enforced for uni, and we don’t select enough for skills. As a person who couldn’t understand social expectations (=Asperger) this is extremely stressful, but now I just read it as the first installment of normal people’s revenge over the work-minded. For what, I don’t know, it’s not like we’ll end up with their loving wife or recognition, but I assure it takes many forms.

Meanwhile Asian countries select for skills and don’t hesitate to give 14hrs per day of courses at high school in China depending on provinces. Not that it is enjoyable, but we won’t enjoy much when we have to acknowledge their superiority.

A few spots for IQ160 people still excludes a lot of good workers. Perhaps we shouldn’t suppress our hard workers, perhaps we should even acknowledge them, even if they seem boring for normal people.

Meanwhile if those could actually help us socially, that would be a big win-win, if only because socially-excluded people are harmful to others, maybe also because most tax dollars comes from hard workers.

[kridsdale1]

I'm not too worried about those Chinese kids who have done nothing but hit the books with their lives.