Earlier (March 2022): MIT Bucks The Trend Against The SAT/ACT

MIT has taken the strongest stand of any American college in favor of keeping the SAT or ACT admissions test. Not surprisingly, MIT is doing pretty well. Raj Chetty’s data shows that MIT students with bachelors degrees make more money at age 30 than bachelor degree grads from any other college in the country.

Now, commenter Unladen Swallow notes:

Pretty much all the elite universities, and probably close to elite universities have ditched standards, except for MIT. This is evident in the famous Putnam Math competition for American and Canadian universities; The last three competitions every Putnam Fellow, students with the five highest scores has been an MIT student

From an MIT press release:

MIT wins 83rd Putnam Mathematical Competition, sweeps top five spots for third consecutive year

Twenty-one of the top 25 finishers are MIT students, including the Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Prize winner.

Sandi Miller | Department of Mathematics
Publication Date: February 23, 2023

The MIT math dynasty continues to break records for its performance in the annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. For the third year in a row, MIT students corralled all five of the top Putnam Fellow spots, and for the fourth time in as many years, won the Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Prize for the top-scoring woman. In total, a striking 70 out of this year’s top 100 test-takers were MIT students, including 21 of the top 25.

In its 83rd year, the Putnam Competition is the premier mathematical competition for undergraduate students in the United States and Canada and is administered by the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). The intense six-hour exam, which features 12 proof-based math problems, was taken by 3,415 students from 456 institutions on Dec. 3, 2022. Results were announced last week.

This year’s Putnam Fellows are first-years Papon Lapate and Luke Robitaille, second-year Brian Liu, junior Mingyang Deng, and senior Daniel Zhu. Each Putnam Fellow is awarded $2,500. Zhu has placed as a fellow every year that he has competed in the exam.

This is the MIT team’s seventh first-place win in the past nine competitions. This year, Harvard University came in second, and Stanford University third. …

Junior Binwei Yan, who finished in the top 16, received the Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Prize, which includes a $1,000 award. She is the sixth MIT student to receive this honor since the award began in 1992, and the fourth in a row for MIT.

MIT students also dominated the rest of the scoreboard: nine of the next 11 (each awarded $1,000), seven of the next nine (each awarded $250), and 49 of the 75 honorable mention rankings.

Of test-takers ranked 101-200, there were 28 MIT students, and from 201-500, 47 were from MIT. In total, 145 MIT students placed in the top 500.

[Comment at Unz.com]