This is very helpful, thank you. I’m unfamiliar with boarding schools (sorry), so in normal years, do you fly to the school tour it, and concurrently do in-person interview - and that informs your decision of whether to apply? Then I can understand why interviewers would be encouraging.
We are applying to a competitive day school so all applicants are local. So for us, the normal process would start with an open house / tour. Then you’d decide if you want to apply. Only after deciding to apply, would you go for an interview.
Where I’m getting hung up - I think - is that boarding schools are drawing students from anywhere in the country. So for top boarding schools, there should be no problem finding enough students that are in the top 10 or 20 percentile of SSATs pulled across the country.
But here around a medium/large city? I know this school cares about test scores, but it’s drawing from less than 1% of the U.S. population. It seems like a lot fewer people can “check the boxes” to fit in the top 10-20 percentile of SSAT. Conversely, it makes me feel like checking those boxes would put you in “coin flip” territory rather than “crap shoot.”