<p>I think you misunderstood serchingon’s answer, though. There may be “common attributes” to lower scoring students, especially if you look across a large number of competitive colleges, but at any particular college the low-scoring students are likely to have widely different attributes, because they are meeting widely different needs the college has. Also, even if you knew that a particular student is there because he’s a good defensive tackle, and that another particular student is there because she’s an oboist and a prospective Ancient Greek major, you wouldn’t really know how that defensive tackle or that Greek scholar got picked from all the applicants who might have qualified. You also wouldn’t have any idea, looking from the outside, whether the school was going to be short of defensive tackles or oboists this year, or whether there wasn’t some superfine other candidate out there for one of those slots. </p>
<p>Also, if you look at any of the scattergrams that people link to here, you will see that all the top colleges regularly accept relatively lower-scoring students over relatively higher-scoring ones. In some cases, that’s because of special talents, status (legacy, extreme wealth, extreme poverty), or diversity factors, but in most cases it’s because the admissions committee reads the whole application, not just the stats summary.</p>