Word: malines
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This is not to say Harvard gets to the world's top applicants. The best two or three students in a European high school would normally apply to Oxford or Cambridge if they intended to study outside their own countries, Malin says. Nonetheless, the qualifications of those accepted are very high, according to Malin. "You really do have to be a little extraspecial to get in as a foreign student," he says...
...surprisingly, one of those extraspecial traits is an ability to take standardized American tests. Like Mimi Le,85 to 90 per cent of all foreign students accepted, regardless of where they come from, take the SAT tests. Malin acknowledged that the admissions committee "tends to give a break to foreign students taking these tests," since SAT's are a "middle-class oriented, unique American phenomenon," but admissions officers nevertheless demand some proof of academic proficiency...
Predictably, a minimum requirement is good understanding of English. Malin states flatly that without "100 per cent conviction that a student is fluent in English we won't take...
...give way to a more subjective evaluation. Because the usefulness of test scores is limited, students must eventually be judged in the context of their own respective cultures. While a comparable problem exists in U.S. admissions processes, sorting out educational systems on an international scale is infinitely more complex. Malin devotes an entire office bookshelf and much reading time to pamphlets explaining the varying educational philosophies of different nations...
None of this would have been nearly as necessary 15 or 20 years ago. "Harvard-Radcliffe has not always been that high on having foreign students," Malin recalls. Change didn't really come until the early sixties, when the applicant pool began to grow steadily. By 1969, growth had leveled off and the last seven years have seen little variation in the numbers of foreign students flocking to Cambridge...