Yes, I know I am not the decider, lookingforward, #144!
My point about Der Richter und Sein Henker was not about that specific book, but about the pace of the classes. I think you can infer the relative pace of the German classes at Harvard and at Pretty Good University fairly accurately from the information on when the book is covered at different schools that do cover it. ( I won’t even mention that the plural is not covered in first-year Russian at Pretty Good University.)
WUSTL is very highly regarded. But I don’t think its science and math courses are as fast paced as Caltech’s. They didn’t seem to think so either, in my friend’s case.
What are the odds that I know the only US student whose initial admissions outcomes were inconsistent with genuine brilliance + hard work + good personality? So, though I can offer only one instance from my own knowledge, this seems likely to be generalizable. Of course, sometimes exceedingly rare events happen, so maybe there is only this one case in all of US college admissions.
With regard to the UK, I am not claiming that it is perfect. However, admission to Oxford and Cambridge is a good deal more predictable for top academic students than it is in the US. Occasionally there are major hiccups. For example, I knew a really bright British student who had trouble with the “practical” exam at A level (qualitative inorganic analysis) and did not get into Cambridge as an undergrad as a result. But later he sailed through the academic system, and did extremely well. This kind of thing happens. Of course, there is no guarantee that he would have fared better in the US.
When I wrote about second-tier institutions earlier on, I meant sub-flagship public universities. One complicating factor locally was that an unweighted GPA of 3.7 meant that a student was in the top 40% of the class (no kidding). No weighted GPAs were computed. This made the “eh, I’ll get B’s, no problem” strategy not feasible, for a student who wanted to go to the flagship, and probably not one level below that.
Finally, I did not mean that students “deserved” to get into top schools just because of how hard they had worked in high school. I meant that when students work extraordinarily hard at difficult classes + highly competitive EC’s and cut back on sleep and socializing to do that, they are more likely to feel that their efforts “ought” to lead to “top” college admissions. This is especially true if the students are also exceptionally talented academically, and if other students from their school to whom they are reasonably comparable (if not noticeably “better”) have been successful with “top” school admissions. Around here, this is more of a factor that the “everyone gets a trophy” phenomenon, leading to over-estimation of personal excellence.
I will probably be accused of being “hierarchical” again. But from my vantage point, there are differences in intellectual capability that are quite evident in physics and math classes. Qualities such as resilience and “grit” may level a student up a little, but they don’t actually make up the difference unless it was very small to begin with. (A lot more preparation time and effort might make up the difference, but the number of people willing to start STEM grad school at 35, say, is somewhat limited.) The differences I am mentioning still exist among the students who just walk in to the SATs and walk out with all 800’s; and they do mean something for future accomplishment (in my experience). For career success in most cases, the differences are irrelevant. For career success as a theoretical physicist, they can be make or break.