Yes. There are students who have a 3.5 or less in even the most selective schools. They have other things that make them desirable to the colleges.
Most applicants to these schools are excellent students with great recommendations, accomplishments in extracurricular activities, writing good essays. So these schools have a difficult job having to reject the vast majority of these excellent applicants. They have to look for reasons to reject if the students are not stand outs in something they want.
So if there is no such attribute that has.a school, saying, “we want this”. And it’s something rare. Like very few applicants have this attribute. If that’s not the case, the AO has to start culling the many applications to get the best of the bunch. Even there, students with perfect SATs, perfect grades may find themselves cut because there are too many of them, though most school categorize test scores and class rank in a way so that “perfect” does not stand out from the line drawn for the top category.
Given that info, those with a 3.5 gpa, are often cut. Not all, but most,