From my ds experience at Peabody, academics matter. As detailed in a previous post (circa 2015) she was sent a rejection letter from Peabody and subsequently contacted by the prescreen review assistant explaining that they were not able to view her prescreen. After the initial confusion, my d explained that she had already received the rejection letter. The individual on the phone then said that my d was disqualified due to her test scores (my d has severe discalculia and dyslexia which make test taking problematic).
Nevertheless she is at a program which is perfect for her and she loves…so it all worked out in the end.
Morale of the story, some schools have baseline qualifiers that have nothing to do with the actual audition. Don’t know which ones, but if I had to guess…NYU, NEC, USC are a few that come to mind.