[RockyMcNuts]

I call BS to some extent, to both the original post and this comment.

I went to a major Ivy. I know firsthand of someone who got early admission without doing senior year (from an elite foreign school); in honors calculus we had a high school kid who ran circles around us (not a full-time degree student IIRC); in our CS program we had a Doogie Howser type who was admitted in his teens and last I heard was some kind of security guru.

I'm sure any top school has a small number of brilliant students with oddball backgrounds. In other countries you have to get the piece of paper, but in the US no one cares about a HS diploma. If you can show you've got the goods, it doesn't matter how you show it.

(Although MIT is more likely to care purely about ability to be a great engineer as opposed to a well-rounded human being - to that extent I can believe other schools would not have been receptive to a candidate based on code LOL)

[hga]

MIT doesn't care purely" "about ability to be a great engineer as opposed to a well-rounded human being", some* of the latter is required. And in my experience that isn't too hard to find, how many great engineers or scientists that you've known or heard of are only interested in their work and have no interest in, say, music (that was common at MIT in the '80s at least).