[nicholas73]

While I agree on the money aspect, other achievements provide more points of differentiation for top candidates. MIT likely is deciding amongst students with about perfect scores anyway.

I had a bout of diarrhea during my SAT 2 Math (the harder one, whatever it's called) and still scored 780/800. I was a bit annoyed that one question put me down huge percentiles though, because you could miss like 10 questions and still get 800.