There’s another reason the admission officers might not want to be honest with you, even if they have everyone’s best interests at heart.
Maybe they think that extracurricular activities are (good) proxies for the hard-to-measure personal qualities they’re really interested in, but not really valuable in themselves: the correlation isn’t a causation. Then letting applicants know about the proxies would lead only to reducing the proxies’ value as more people adopted the ‘right’ extracurriculars.
Yes, I agree. I kinda touched on this above when I argued that specifics about which extracurriculars are preferred would result in more people trying to game the system.
When you think about all the system-gaming which goes on (and it does seem to be rampant), it would be surprising if any elite college would share specific, useful information about what it looks for in applicants’ extracurriculars.
There’s another reason the admission officers might not want to be honest with you, even if they have everyone’s best interests at heart.
Maybe they think that extracurricular activities are (good) proxies for the hard-to-measure personal qualities they’re really interested in, but not really valuable in themselves: the correlation isn’t a causation. Then letting applicants know about the proxies would lead only to reducing the proxies’ value as more people adopted the ‘right’ extracurriculars.
Yes, I agree. I kinda touched on this above when I argued that specifics about which extracurriculars are preferred would result in more people trying to game the system.
When you think about all the system-gaming which goes on (and it does seem to be rampant), it would be surprising if any elite college would share specific, useful information about what it looks for in applicants’ extracurriculars.