Why students with perfect grades get rejected

AA former reader in the Stanford admissions office we learned from put it in a line his colleagues repeated: numbers matter more than you would like, and less than you think. Grades and scores are necessary at a selective college and never sufficient, because every year tens of thousands of American students graduate first in their class and compete with one another, and with the world, for a few thousand seats at the most selective universities.

Numbers cannot sort a pool where so many people have the same ones. Families who spend the next year chasing one more point are often working on the wrong question, and the cost shows up every spring in decisions that seem to make no sense.