Word: procession
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...agonizing, seemingly irrational process, which only works if the men on the admissions committee have faith in it. And they do. "If you turn this many people away, you've got to believe you have a reason for it," Peterson says. "I think this is a very effective system...
Other members of the staff echo his faith in the selection process, which has remained essentially the same since World War II. Peterson's concept of how to improve the quality of Harvard classes is not to change the basic process, but to recruit better applicants, particularly in areas where few students feel impelled to apply to Harvard. As more recruiting has been done in the South over the past ten years, the dockets have been adjusted and more Southerners admitted...
While the selection process now approaches the ultimate in meritocracy, with each man considered as an individual who might or might not profit from four years at Harvard, there is nonetheless an incredible statistical consistency to the Harvard classes. The number of students admitted from California never doubles from one year to the next, and Exeter is never shut out completely. The number of Harvard sons admitted stays rather constant (although the number rejected is increasing rapidly), and the ratio of public school students to private school students changes at a slow and smooth rate, in the direction...
...consecutive students from a small town in Oregon, it will become wary of admitting more. Perhaps, as Whitla suggests, the advocate himself will not be able to find it in him to argue a tenth case enthusiastically. More important, there is something of a quota built into the admissions process. This is the docket system. Applicants are divided into 22 dockets, according to the secondary school the student attended. Far from Harvard, the docket divisions are large geographical units; Docket B, for example, is The Rockies, and G is Ohio and Kentucky. But further East, Docket K is Cambridge, Docket...
Talk about quotas irks admissions staffers because they don't like to think of the admissions process as a mechanical one. And despite the statistical consistency of the class from year to year, admissions staffers work long and hard precisely because they refuse to rely on the numbers. Sandy Koufax's earned-run average always hovered around 2.0, but he sweated for every strikeout...