[nostrademons]

Problem is that every other metric is absolutely worse.

When you think about it, the whole idea of rating one human being as "better" or "more deserving" than another is pretty much absurd. But universities have a limited number of spots that they can devote time and attention to, and they have to prune the applicant pool down to something manageable. People are very uncomfortable with randomness, so if a university's admission policy was "We'll pick 1 out of 10 at random", the applicants would go "WTF?" So they make up some arbitrary metrics, add in some guesswork, and try to assemble an incoming class that they feel will be as interesting as possible.

It's sort of unfortunate that their rather arbitrary decision acts as the gatekeeper to something that lots of people want - a good, high-paying, intellectually challenging job. Chalk up another one to "life's not fair".