Privilege vs potential in college admissions

[ucbalumnus]

@roesthlisburger

This is a myth. From memory, somewhere between 300-600 kids get a perfect SAT score. Harvard admits about 2000 kids a year. Harvard, and most other elite schools, couldn’t admit a freshman class of perfect SAT scores if they wanted to. Caltech might come the closest, but with a total undergrad enrollment of less than a thousand students, they have one of the smallest class size to fill.

The SAT, ACT, SAT subject and AP tests for math have ceilings that are too low for Caltech. Perhaps not in the scoring (where a minor mistake can reduce the score from 800 to 780 or whatever), but in the content and difficulty of the problems.