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<p>This is silly. No one “deserves” a spot. Admission can be worked for and wanted, but no one “deserves” a spot any top university (or any non-open admissions university, actually). So if they get in, they get in.</p>
<p>The problem with your post is that you think you know a lot about these applicants but you, like the rest of us, probably don’t. They clearly offered something that Stanford wanted or they wouldn’t have been accepted. Stanford definitely doesn’t just randomly select students, but the process can seem arbitrary when so many awesome students apply that it’s difficult to determine who was admitted for what reason.</p>
<p>You can’t say “more traditionally qualified.” Do you mean that they were higher scoring students? Obviously Stanford doesn’t care about just high-scoring students, since they don’t except all their 2400s and 4.0s. What I’m trying to get across here is that because we know so little about the admissions process, we can’t say that one student was more qualified than another. Statistics aren’t the issue here, so that’s a terrible measuring stick.</p>