<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>
<p>He made it extremely clear that that is NOT what he meant. Maybe you should reread his post. It was very obvious to me that when he said “qualified”, he meant students that are either 1.) academic superstars 2.) passionate, driven people in regards to EC’s 3.) badass essay writers or 4.) all of the above. For students who don’t fit into any of those, it can be strange to figure how they’d be admitted unless they were a URM or from some type of harsh background, which the admittees at his school did not seem to be. Stanford itself says it admits many “average joes”, and no one has been able to explain this quote yet.</p>