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I pretty much agree with everything you said pebbles, although I think that while you can't rank applicants from 1-1500 you can most certainly distinguish between them. You don't necessarily need a lining up of students from 1-1500, but I think people can and do mentally categorize applicants with respect to quality. You're right about an applicant competing against a pool rather than a specific person, my example fails in that respect. If you can categorize applicants than you can say that an average student who was a URM got in over an above average student, and in that sense you are giving up "talent" as defined by the categories. At least that's the way I think about it.
It's hard for me to agree because I've seen a case where a wealthy URM with mediocre stats and nothing special is accepted over a kid who won many math competitions, went to ISEF, had amazing scores, was universally considered a genius and a good guy, and was an amazing writer. I know you aren't supposed to compare people with people but rather a person vs the applicant pool; but it's hard for me to believe that accepting the URM over the other applicant wouldn't detract from the talent in the student body. To be honest this argument isn't going anywhere, so I'm just going to drop it.
Pebbles and Molliebatmit, thank you for actually responding to my posts.
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