[antasvara]

Colleges have limited capacity, and individual departments have even less. Given this information, what criteria would you suggest be used when determining admission into a department if not "likelihood of academic success?"

[dgacmu]

This is the core thing. Our acceptance rate is extremely low - under 10% for computer science. There are a lot of things we want to accomplish in admissions; _one_ of them is a statistical bias towards being able to succeed in the program. We obviously can't predict super accurately for a single student, but we try to create scoring criteria that result in success. Dropping the SAT caused a statistically significant reduction in success. We look at a lot of things, but, much as Harvard observed, a lot of those other things have even more bias. If you rocked the AIME, for example, we know a lot about your math skills, but there's a lot of bias ($$$) in which schools make it possible to participate in that, and there are a lot of students who will do well despite not having done AMC/AIME. Etc.