<p>Interested Dad,</p>
<p>I have no objection, as I have repeated ad nauseam, to the use of subjective measures of intellectual ability in admissions. In fact, I think the best system is one that combines subjective measures and objective measures and allows the subjective ones to be put in context. By the way grades are a subjective measure. It would be wrong to do so, but I could go back over the admitted student thread and pick out the students who were admitted on a non-academic basis with a high degree of accuracy. I would not catch all of them because, as I have admitted ad nauseam, some are indistinguishable from other candidates. But very few of the ones I pick out would have been selected because they wrote a great essay or had exceptional recommendations.</p>