Admission: Fill & Download for Free

When I was in high school, I was in the National Honor Society. When I first started, I found that we were required to pay an admission fee.Me being the pedantic jerk I was, I read the bylaws of The National Honor Society - it turns out you can’t charge an admission fee.I brought this to the attention of the sponsor, and told him I wouldn’t be paying the fee.At the next meeting, we were told that, as of that day, we were no longer required to pay an admission fee. Cheers erupted. We were then told that we had to make a mandatory donation to the NHS chapter of our school in order to be considered for admission. The amount? The same as the “admission fee”.I scoured the bylaws, but sadly, there was nothing that banned mandated contributions to charity.I made the donation (I think it was $20). The look on the sponsor’s face was priceless…he had squashed the smug kid who tried to get something for free.I still feel dirty about it. It was “pay to play” in the worst way.

Someone actually already answered this question on Caltech Confessions:But in all seriousness I think there are a few reasons:Merit-based admissions: Caltech admissions are extremely merit-based. They don’t even practice affirmative action (source) though they have been able to achieve a pretty impressive gender ratio for a tech school just by getting more girls in the application pipeline. You also don’t really hear of kids ‘buying’ their way into Caltech.STEM: If you go to Caltech, you are most likely pursuing a career in STEM which I don’t think was the case for the students in the college admissions scandal.Athletics: A lot of students involved in the recent college admission scandal were able to get into school through paying off coaches (one source). Caltech is a Division III school where academics take higher priority over athletics. From what I’ve heard about the admissions process, athletics/team recruitments are only considered after the admissions committee have determined a pool of students who can handle Caltech and are trying to narrow that already small pool down.Difficulty: Caltech is notoriously difficult. If you have to resort to bribery and fraud to get in, it’s unlikely you will be able to handle the coursework.

I applied to MIT in 1999 and was accepted early. I didn’t have exceptional grades (3.6 GPA) or an exceptional SAT score (1420). I had a few extracurricular like glee club and chess club (pretty nerdy) but nothing spectacular except that I had taught myself electronics using an old kit that belonged to my father who passed away when I was very young.In addition to all the regular applications stuff like transcripts, interview and essays, there was a page on the application which was left blank for the applicant to fill with whatever they wanted. You could write a poem, make a sketch, draw a diagram, paste a picture, etc.I went to RadioShack and bought a recording chip, a little red push button, small speaker, battery holder and PCB board. I sandwiched the board on the back of the paper and placed the push button, speaker, battery and chip on the front and soldered the whole thing together. I wrote “press the button” on the front of the paper with an arrow pointing to the red button.It looked something like this, imagine a paper sandwiched in between the green PCB and the brown back part. (This image, although similar, is not of the device I made, it was borrowed from from 10s LIGHT SENSOR RECORD device voice module music box sound chip automatic talk | eBay).When you pressed the button it played the recording that said: “Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to admit me to MIT. This message will NOT self destruct. Play it back as many times as necessary to admit me to MIT”Years later I stopped by the admissions office to inquire about it. They said they remembered the application, it had stopped playing but they still had the device saved in the archives.