<p>"i also thought it was on a point scale. they rank you 1-5 on different categories such as sat/gpa/ec's and then put on a 50 pt scale."</p>
<p>Some colleges do do that. I'm pretty sure Stanford uses the 1-5 scale for different areas of your application and then adds them up or something like that. I think MIT uses a graph sort of thing where grades/SAT's are on one axis with character/EC's on the other. Neither of these methods have cutoffs though, they are just to give Adcoms a better idea of what they're looking at.</p>