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<p>I am fully aware that over 50% of vals and 2400ers are rejected. I’m certainly not an idiot or uninformed in regards to this process. What I’m saying, which I think you caught on to but refuse to acknowledge, is that the majority of applicants who are accepted to Stanford in the like were not valedictorians (only 30% of acceptees or so are) or 2400 SATers (only 238 HSers in the United States scored a 2400 on the SAT last year). Many of them were not Val or Sal, and some were even at the bottom of that 10% or even a little bit outside of it. </p>
<p>If Stanford accepted people based solely on numbers, their 25% marks for matriculants on the SAT sections would not average in the mid-600s. I am fully aware of how competitive admissions to a school like this are; but academics, and class rank specifically, are only a small part of a bigger picture that constitutes the “why” of acceptance letters there. Students from particularly interesting backgrounds, those with diverse life experiences, those who have something else going for them in the form of extracurriculars, and others who faced hardship in different ways, most certainly do not have to be Valedictorian or Salutatorian to get into Stanford. If so was the case, Stanford would be a student body consisting almost entirey of Vals with a few Sals here and here.</p>