<p>I wasn’t attributing any specific type of personality to perfect scorers. I was making a joke about QuantMech’s “community” (via his profile), and making what I regard as a factual statement. By and large, more perfect scorers choose Harvard (which pays fairly little attention to perfect scores) over places like Caltech (which pays more attention, even if it does choose to consider other, extraneous information). As someone said before, the perfect scorers want to rub elbows with the moneyed elite and athletes, even if they are slightly less intelligent.</p>
<p>Dragging my son into it illustrates another reason why colleges don’t value perfect scores that much: they aren’t very perfect. At the time he applied to college, my son had near-perfect scores in math, an 800 SAT I, 790 SAT II, and no classroom grade below 91 ever. He was also a couple of months away from hitting a wall in calculus, one that gave him his only sub-80 grade for a marking period in his high school career. He then hit precisely the same wall in college, and went from an A to a C+ in the space of one quarter. The fact is, he isn’t that good at math, doesn’t really like it, etc. You just couldn’t tell that at all from his paper credentials.</p>