So there was a battle of the experts in the Harvard lawsuit. One thing that was clear is that the personal factor was definitely not just a proxy for academics or objective measures of “achievement”. In terms of ethnicity, all ethnicities had members who got the necessary personal scores for admission, but there was a higher frequency in some ethnicities than others.
The plaintiffs’ expert argued this was evidence of ethnic bias. The defense expert argued that there were other explanatory factors that simply correlated with ethnicity. Harvard won that issue at trial, and it was not one of the issues that the Supreme Court reversed on appeal.
In any event, regardless of what one feels about that issue, it is empirically inconsistent with spike theory. Meaning if spike theory was correct, Harvard would simply have been admitting whatever students scored best on academics/achievements. And it was not.
And it was more than a “fudge factor”. Almost everyone got either a 2 (very good) or a 3 (generally positive) for this factor on Harvard’s 6-point scale. If you got 2s for academics and activities, and also got a personal 2, you were likely to be admitted. If you got 2s for academics and activities, but only got a personal 3, you were unlikely to be admitted. A few unhooked people got admitted with personal 3s and academic or activity 1s, which would be consistent with spike theory, but those cases were relatively rare compared to the 2/2/2 cases. Meaning many more people got in thanks to a personal 2 than an academic or activities “spike” that Harvard credited as truly unusual.
All this said, my intention here is not to try to relitigate whether or not what Harvard is doing in holistic review is reasonable or instead biased. My intention is just to make it clear to the OP that the actual data was inconsistent with spikes playing more than a minor role in Harvard admissions, but consistent with Harvard’s personal score–whatever that may mean–playing a major role.
Which is exactly how Harvard always said it worked. They always said these personal factors were critical, that they were used to decide which of the far too many applicants they thought were qualified actually got admitted. And that is what they were in fact doing, for good or ill.