<p>deeptin, while it is tempting to believe that, colleges absolutely do compare you to your other HS students. While they dont have exact quotas, they have rough quotas. I know many people misinterpret what the colleges craftily say, but the fact is, they are judging you in context with your other school applicants. They want people who excel in their environment. Being a 4.0 lots of activities person isn’t a big thing at all if your from a overpriveleged school with 50 similar applicants. It’s like on the SAT when you see answers to a question that are literally the same, you can eliminate both. If you are the only student from your school with X level of achievement, your chances are better than if HPYS sees that… oh, its apparently not hard at your school to do that acheivement because 15 other students did it. If there are 4 applicants who list “Debate Team Captain”, then that achievement is utterly worthless and will arouse suspicion. </p>
<p>Of course, people who get mad about this certain thing are stupid because its stupid to lose sleep over things you have no way of controlling. But the quantity and quality of applicants from your school does, however minorly affect your admissions chances, despite what colleges say. No I don’t have Harvard’s Dean of admissions telling me this, but I have an uncle who is a ad-officer at a top 20 college, and I have common sense.</p>