[jancsika]

> play an instrument (very well, but not remarkably),

Let's take your low end of 600 students. Let's say you are a former musician and could judge their ability after listening to a mere 1 minute of music. Plus perhaps 30 seconds to reflect upon what you heard and make some notes.

That alone is 15 hours of your work week as an admissions officer, or 3% of your total time for the review period if you figure a full 3 months of reviews for applications. That's assuming you didn't listen to musical excerpts from the thousands of other musician students you ostensibly reviewed to fill in the slots for the rest of the Freshman class.

Did you do that as an admissions officer?

[jeffreyrogers]

Of course you don't do that. You look to see what orchestras they were in as a kid, what competitions they've won, etc. You'll immediately see that most people who list music as an extracurricular are decent, but nothing extraordinary. If you are really good then you can meet with someone at the music department at the university you're applying to, perform for them, and if they think you're good enough they'll tell the admissions department and give your application a boost.

I'm not sure what you're trying to suggest the OP do differently with this comment.

[jancsika]

> Of course you don't do that. You look to see what orchestras they were in as a kid, what competitions they've won, etc. You'll immediately see that most people who list music as an extracurricular are decent, but nothing extraordinary. If you are really good then you can meet with someone at the music department at the university you're applying to, perform for them, and if they think you're good enough they'll tell the admissions department and give your application a boost.

Compare with:

Of course you don't spend 3% of the process critically reading essays. You look to see what writing groups they were in as a kid, what essay contests they've won, etc. You'll immediately see that most people who list writing as an extracurricular are decent, but nothing extraordinary. If you are really good then you can meet with someone at the English department at the university you're applying to, let them read your entrance essay, and if they think you're good enough they'll tell the admissions department and give your application a boost.

The difference is that we presume the OP did take the time to critically read those essays. Imagine if OP had written, "I didn't see much in the way of extra-curricular writing activities, so I can assumed those 600 essays were boring." It's not a serious statement.

Presumably there is a web portal for retrieving the essays, reading them in the browser, making comments, etc. Presumably that web portal exists because admissions can assume with impunity that admissions officers are literate and can critically read and rate an essay according to some predetermined rubric.

We don't have that same kind of API for musical excerpts because we don't have the same rate of musical literacy we have for reading literacy. That's unfortunate because an admissions officer could tell a lot about the applicant's propensity for risk taking, sense of humor, and a lot of other important characteristics that are difficult to convey in test scores and essay form.

[jeffreyrogers]

That's not really a fair comparison. The equivalent would be someone listing writing as an extracurricular activity and then you look and see what novels they've published, what anthologies their poetry has appeared in, whether they've written essays or journalism that got published in the New Yorker or a similar, high quality publication.

Again, I'm not sure what you're suggesting the OP do differently. It's not feasible for admissions directors to be experts in every area they're evaluating candidates on, so they have to outsource some of that to people who have already evaluated the candidates on those dimensions.

[jancsika]

Regardless of what you think the fair comparison is, it wouldn't be serious to claim that the writing is unremarkable without... reading the writing.

Same goes for playing an instrument. You have to listen to the applicant to know whether their playing is remarkable or not.

To be as clear as possible: OP should have reserved judgment on the musical prowess of the applicants instead of claiming all 600-1000 applicants were unremarkable players without having listened to them.

tldr; "I didn't see any musical accolades listed in their packets" != "unremarkable players."

[citizenkeen]

I don't believe you have to listen to a student musician to judge them. You can see on their application what they've achieved. Are they third chair in some youth philharmonic? That's not remarkable. If they were remarkable, they would have remarkable achievements on their application.