<p>@LHC: I don’t think it’s “really” rare to have such high school students as applicants applying to Caltech!Again, Caltech can definitely fill out its class with 200 international applicants who have such activities. If one lives in a quite well-opened countries like China, Singapore, Western Europe, Russia or USA and some other countries, one shouldn’t bother to borrowing the reason like you stated:" I don’t have opportunities to do those TOUGH things!" to avoid the fact that “he personally didn’t take all of the opportunities open to himself, either directly or indirectly in his life!” Such applicants, no matter how GREAT their test scores are, deserve a rejection letter! The explanation is easy: they are too less self-motivated and driven to become another Feynman, who is the typical figure of Caltech! Why do admission officers accept such a normal applicant like that, if they keep saying they want another “Feynman or Euler?” My point is that with such a small accepted applicants pool, Caltech REALLY SHOULD be aware of the applicants who are not self-motivated, or that driven, apply to it annually! I’m pretty sure that such number of applicants increase a lot, and if the admissioner officers basically said “yes” to just 5% of those guys, they apparently reject a huge number of the most driven, self-motivated applicants who ACTUALLY know and understand clearly what they want to do at Caltech, or even further in their lives! Again, passion MUST BE weighted more, or Caltech simply loses a bunch of geniuses out there just because its admission system contains a serious flaw: Accept people with high raw score and FAKED passion! Unfortunately, I have seen such number of admitted applicants who exactly belong to this group rises year by year at Caltech:(</p>