

Can undergraduate admissions officers tell if you aren't actually a good coder? - fireyo
http://www.quora.com/How-technical-are-undergraduate-admissions-officers-at-esteemed-universities-like-Stanford-and-MIT?share=1

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joshvm
No, short answer.

This isn't an issue with coding, it's simply one of more modern things that
people have started lying about on their CVs. Of course we still have the good
old summer placement descriptions where "typing numbers into Excel" magically
becomes "solving serious engineering challenges".

Ultimately if you're reviewing this sort of thing, you learn to use judgement
about who is telling the truth and who isn't. Most of the time you can't and
you go by your gut instinct.

At a recent summer camp I help out at, we had maybe 20 students doing
progrmaming projects. Around 15 claimed some experience with programming
either in their application or through email correspondence before the camp. I
think perhaps two managed to write a FizzBuzz program in under ten minutes?

I doubt this is something MIT is immune from. It is a problem which
particularly plagues undergraduate admissions where students are pressured
into making the most boring events sound spectactular in order to compete with
about a thousand other people. This is why almost all the top institutions
interview.

I once spoke to an admissions tutor at Oxford (Physics) and he said that
essentially they ignore the application. They'll interview you if your grades
are good enough and go solely on that. If your grades are close, but your
application is great then they'll consider it. They introduced entrance exams,
but even they were a poor performance indicator because rich kids pay tutors
to help them prepare which skews the results.

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xpda
Tom Stagliano's makes the point. It doesn't matter. Coding is a tool to use at
the university level, not the goal of education. In addition, coding can be
learned at the university and is not necessary for admission.

