Yes, no one has any idea - but one can have a hypothesis.
Mine is she wouldn’t have gotten in with or without the 32.
Is that why she was turned down or other reasons - I don’t know nor did I say I knew.
I simply am hypothesizing that submitting or not submitting wouldn’t have made a difference.
As I noted before, she made the ultimate decision as to where to submit and where not. She submitted to 20 and not to Rice and felt good about her decision.
There was a gal from my son’s HS who got in and is attending Rice having applied TO. Our school is relatively well resourced with SAT scores averaging in the mid-1200s. She had perfect grades, very high rigor (a bit less so in science classes) and was the type of student who spoke in class a lot and teachers loved and gave top student class awards to. So I suspect her LOR were very strong. I wrote her a non-teacher LOR (I was the advisor on an academic team) so I was pretty familiar with her and her file but never read her essays.
I don’t recall all of her ECs but I think they were pretty good. In talking to her, I think she wrote a pretty compelling narrative of what she wanted to pursue (law) and many of her activities were geared that way and she held leadership roles. She earned mostly 5s on her AP exams but her SAT score I think was in the 1300s and she chose not to submit. She applied ED1 to Rice and got in. I understand Rice was fairly generous with its financial aid as well to the point that it was cheaper for her to attend Rice than the UCs.
That said, I do agree with the general consensus that Rice does prefer scores. Our school has had another 2-3 kids get in and attend recently and all had very high test scores and were NM semifinalists. I can think of at least one other student who didn’t have as high a test score not get in.
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