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""Spotless stats" don't mean crap. "
I take some offense to this. Spotless Stats should still be a goal -- perfection or something approaching perfection should be an aspiration, although they are rarely achieved.
As someone who used to work in theatre, I realize now that there are a lot of parallels between that world and the world of admissions. Two actresses audition for the same part. One is clearly the superior actress, but she is short and brunette and the director envisioned a tall blond. The other girl gets the part.
College admissions casts a class. It is not a pure meritocracy by any definition. A few years back, Harvey Mudd sent out a brochure where they bragged about accepting an applicant with clearly sub-par academic achievements, but she was a female interested in engineering (there aren't that many of them), who she was also from an underrepresented state and she happened to be a world-class log-roller. Log-roller! Log-rolling, of course, has nothing to do with academia, nor does Harvey Mudd have a log-rolling team, but they thought she would be an interesting addition to the "campus mix."
Now, as cool as that may sound to some people, how would you like to be the kid sitting next to her in high school class, working far harder than her on academics, getting far better grades, far better scores, simply being far more intelligent, showing far more passion for engineering, but you were not accepted by the same college? Pretty darn ticked off, I would say, and rightly so.
Thus, since no one would ever say, "Oh, log-roller -- that's a guaranteed lock for a top college," it does make many people look at college admissions as more of a crap shoot than a fair and logical process. If you cannot point a student toward a logical path, it demonstrates randomness to the whole process.
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