<p>I looked at the scattergrams for my son’s high school to see if I could detect a pattern of rejections/waitlistings for highly qualified students at some of these schools, while somewhat less qualified applicants were admitted. I couldn’t see this for Tufts, but the pattern of admissions/waitlistings at Swarthmore sure looked like they were waitlisting the most high-scoring students while accepting students with lesser stats. There could be lots of reasons for these patterns, though.</p>