[_w6l2]

> A top school is a good signal for how much time someone spent studying in high school, except for affirmative action students who get into top schools with much worse scores and GPA.

For the truly competitive schools, the affirmative action students still need very high scores and GPA, they just tend to be given a little more of a pass on the extracurricular activities and essays in the application. I'd argue that for the most part, students of any demographic have to do some pretty crazy things to get the attention of top schools. The probabilities of an affirmative action student being granted admittance are just much higher than for an equivalent non-affirmative action student, but that doesn't mean that affirmative action students can get away with having poorer grades and scores. I'd argue they just have to be less well-rounded.