<p>Northstarmom, I disagree with your claim that Caltech focuses much more on scores. From my time here and talking to admissions they really just want the smartest people possible who can handle the rigors of all of our insane classes - incidentally the smartest people have the best scores. Besides I don’t see how every single freshman having a SAT 2 Math2 score of 800 proves that Tech is score centric. The thing is to get an 800 on that test you need to be in the top 12% of scores for the test (at least two years ago that’s what it was). I think it’s pretty reasonable to assume that the people who can get into Caltech and stand four years of academic bootcamp will easily have an 800 on that test. Plus Caltech pretty much only select kids based of their intelligence and not on any other factor - so it’s not unreasonable at all to have a hole class with 800 Math2c scores.</p>