I worked for one Ivy League university and a large publicly supported research university that people here frequently hail as being in the top two or three. I agree entirely that schools are very different. At both universities I worked at, we worked hard to compensate for this. Indeed, we had 25+ admissions officers, assigned by region, whose responsibility it was to make precisely this sort of adjustment. My point was that if your child is at a very good school, the fact that h/she takes many APs won’t compensate for a 3.3 GPA and that the student who took a “mix” of classes and got a 3.8 will look better.