MIT interview for international applicants?

In my country, people often say that if MIT invites you to have an interview, you will be 80% accepted ( depends on your interview a lot)
On the other hand, if you are not offered any interview, you are very likely to be rejected.
Is this rumor true? Because I myself saw a lot applicants got interviews and then got into MIT, and many applicants who didn’t get any interview and were rejected?

False

@rothstem May I ask why you’re so sure?

As an international student, you personally know a lot of students that have gotten into MIT? I find that impossible to believe. MIT only accepts about 150 international students a year across 6 continents and you saw many of them get interviews and acceptances. You are obviously not being serious. I’m sure because MIT grants interviews before they read the applications, so it’s not possible. As long as they have an educational consultant in the area they will do their best to grant an interview if not they will waive it and it won’t count against the applicant.

@rothstem I know about 5 students, including foreign friends, that got into MIT last year. Last year, three friends of mine who lived in the same city applied to MIT, but only one of them was offered an interview via Skype. I’m curious that if there was no EC in their city, then why MIT didn’t offer Skype interview for all three applicants?
Moreover, the interview happened in late February, so I thought that the admission committee already read their applications and chose who to interview.
Finally, only the applicant who was offered an interview got in. The other two were rejected.

This is news to me, @Mikayle, can you add your expertise to this thread?

I chair an international branch of the MIT Educational council, and I can confirm that for the overwhelming majority of the world, this is simply not true. For most of the world, there are enough EC’s or few enough, that everyone or nobody gets interviews. So for example, if you are applying from most countries, everyone will get offered an interview. If however you are applying from Madagascar (and I have just looked up the EC directory to get an appropriate country), we don’t have any EC’s so that anyone applying from there would likely have their interview waived. This holds true for almost all of the globe, with the single exceptions of India and China. In those two countries, there are so many applicants per EC that different rules apply. I have absolutely no idea what rules apply in those two countries, but it would be certainly possible that not every applicant was offered an interview.

@Mikalye thank you for your information. Now, I understand why people tell this rumor