<p>ucbalumnus</p>
<p>I generally agree with what you’ve written. Randomness – here’s the question, let’s say that a school admitted 100 students (and rejected 300) on Wednesday. If you took the same applications, and gave them to a different committee, how many of the 100 would be admitted – my guess would be that if the school had a good process you’d see about 85-90 of the same names, but if your answer is anything less than 100 (which would be truly extraordinary) there is some randomness in the system. The last few acceptance/rejections are so incredibly close that one couldn’t (and wouldn’t be expected to) reproduce the same acceptance pool. </p>
<p>Other than that – clearly different schools look for different things, and grades/scores aren’t the whole story.</p>
<p>My bigger point to OP – things like this happen in college admissions and in life, and friends are there for each other to share good news and bad.</p>