Let me give an example that took place at Dartmouth during a reading retreat, when the whole admissions office gets together, discusses strategies and priorities for the upcoming year, and then reads through actual case studies from the current year's class. All thirteen of us prepared the five case studies the night before so we could read our write-ups aloud and then see how people voted. The biggest disagreement concerned an extremely subtle case of a girl who came from a very humble background. She knew early on that she wanted to be a veterinarian, and she had started working ten hours a week and all summer for two years in a vet's office to obtain firsthand experience. Veterinary medicine was her passion, and you could see throughout all her class work and activities that she was preparing for a career in the field. All her recommendations stressed that she was very quiet but that when she did contribute to class, she almost always offered a tremendous and insightful thought that really turned the classroom into a live arena for debate. One even referred to her as something like a "creative whirlwind of ideas." Though all her teachers said she was modest and quiet, no one said that she was a low impact person who just blended in with the scenery. On the contrary, they all pointed to the fact that she just didn't blather on and on about what she knew, as some students did, but, rather, that her idea was to follow the discussion intently and then to interject her point as things became more interesting.
What became immediately evident in our follow-up discussion was that nearly all the old-guard people in the office immediately latched onto her teachers' remarks about the quiet aspect of her character, stressing that she would be a low-impact person at Dartmouth and would never add to class discussion because she'd be afraid to speak up. In other words, they totally ignored the body of the recommendations, which stressed that she always had meaningful contributions and that she just waited until the right moment to share her thoughts. Based on this information, only two out of thirteen people voted to accept her.
