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<p>That isn’t what the data say. The rate of admission is about 40 percent for perfect SAT on the post-1995 scale, which is higher than the admission rate of valedictorians.
Harvard internal studies show that high SATs correlate with magna and summa degrees, and admissions has cited this as one reason for keeping the SAT requirement. Grades may or may not correlate so well. </p>
<p>Schools other than Harvard put an even higher value on high SAT and the admission rates reflect this. </p>
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<p>At the Ivies, being above a given 90+ percentile on SAT tends to be more important, as measured by admissions rate, than being at the equivalent class rank. I posted some calculations in another thread using the public information at Princeton, Brown and Dartmouth, as well as links to a study that found test scores count more (and with the weight of tests increasing) in the College and Beyond cohort, which is a large data set for selective schools including four Ivies:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/697661-top-schools-value-sat-act-scores-over-gpa-rank-4.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/697661-top-schools-value-sat-act-scores-over-gpa-rank-4.html</a></p>
<p>Basically, being in percentile X of grades has a similar weight to being in percentile X of tests, but the grade scale tops out at a much lower percentile than tests can measure. So high test scores become influential on the admissions results, and test scores overall become a stronger statistical predictor of admission. This includes Ivy League schools.</p>