Still don't understand in any of examples I have given why Eastern is a better place than WSU? Why not compare WSU to WVU, Miss State, Oregon State and a host of schools and not two elite universities and a wanna-be. But like I said fortunately WSU has taken some risks including the likes on the football team in Leon Bender, Eaton, Pointer, and several others. And I can say they have also made special exceptions for non student athletes as well.
It is only one story, but I know a CEO for a top Biotech. After undergrad work, he applied probably at 10 schools (maybe more) for post grad work. Because of his crappy grades his freshman year, 9 said no, no questions asked. The 10th, said come in and talk to the professor heading the program. The doc came out and said, what happened your freshman year? The applicant said his father was diagnosed with cancer at the beginning of his school year and it took a toll on his grades.
He was accepted as the school made the exception. That person has one drug that is frontline for a particular cancer, and he has two outstanding drugs going through phase three. I am glad this professor took the time to ask why his cumulative GPA was lower than the other candidates that were being considered. It would have been a shame if his dedication to manage/cure cancer was stymied because of one bad semester or year and the evaluators had a limited scope.
Okay ... well, I'm trying here. Really, I am. But you are laying out these rambling, desultory streams of random anecdotes without apparent thought given to any particular line of argument. and coming up with these really weird takes regarding what I'm writing -- I certainly didn't say Eastern was better than WSU, and that litany of colleges was in order of increasing prestige (with a big jump) to emphasize implicitly that it wasn't necessary for the fisherman or car lot owner to have attended any of them, with it intentionally getting more ridiculous as one went down the list -- and pretending not to understand, or maybe really not understanding, any of the points I made about the irrelevance of your prior set of anecdotes.
This latest anecdote of a guy who is a CEO of a biotech company is interesting (and a nice story), but it's not clear what it demonstrates. Have you considered any of these?
- For every anecdote you can come up with of a person who was admitted to something despite bad grades, or who went to WSU and wasn't an abject failure despite a bad college GPA, one could come up with myriad examples of failures and misallocated resources. They just aren't spoken of or noteworthy because they are numerous and comport with common sense and experience. That's why the standards exist in the first place. E.g., my roommate freshman year had mediocre credentials, made it in at WSU, and then flunked out. Lots of people in my high school had shitty grades and have done nothing with their lives. So what? What if one of them had turned it around, went to a community college, transferred to WSU, graduated with 2.5 GPA, then parlayed a car sales job into owning multiple car lots and retiring at 50? Does that mean colleges need more people with subpar grades or that WSU needs to prioritize kids from community colleges who can scrape by in college? Does Harvard? What about the kids with good grades who do, in fact, do very well in life? I deal with dozens of them each day. What are you trying to argue?
- What if the biotech CEO, ironically, had a good GRE score offset the poor grades?
- What if the person who wasn't admitted to the grad program, with that guy who now is the biotech CEO taking her spot, would have cured cancer?
- What if this biotech CEO we're talking about wouldn't have had a drug candidate work out and nobody would have heard of him? What does that show?
- Should Harvard just swap classes with WSU because some people at WSU will do OK in life, even as fishermen or something? I mean, seriously, WTF?
I could list about 10,000 other things here ranging from global competition to predictors of success in college, or give you a million anecdotes about people I've dealt with.
Most importantly, and really, this is all you really need to respond to .... what exactly are you arguing for? That the SAT shouldn't be part of an application, even if all this other stuff you are advocating for would still be considered? What is your proposition you're advocating?