Exactly. And the top colleges keep telling us this, but some people don’t want to hear it. I’ve seen statements from both Harvard and MIT admissions offices saying they regard a 750 and an 800 on an SAT as essentially the same score. Students scoring in that range are clearly capable of doing the work, especially if their GPA in a rigorous curriculum reflects that they are capable of harnessing that intellectual fire power to produce real results. Sure, they’d like to have some true geniuses around, people who will make the intellectual breakthroughs of the next generation. But that’s not captured well in standardized tests, whether it’'s the SAT, ACT, or a race-to-the-finish math quiz. A lot of it is the function of creativity and problem-solving ability, a gift for being able to look at an old problem in a new way, or an intuitive knack for spotting a problem that no one’s ever considered before. Standardized tests are terrible at identifying those qualities. Someone who has already shown flashes of that kind of ability in a math or science competition or in a truly original and brilliant written work will be of great interest to them—much more so than the applicant whose main claim to fame is that he scored 800 on every section of the SAT and every subject test he ever took. Or that he scored a 29 on a mathematics speed quiz.