[emamoah]

The "top 10%" thing doesn't make sense mathematically. That depends on the average performance of your classmates. If you were in a school with brilliant students, in a small class, you could be in the top 50%. But with the same performance, just attending a different (low performing) school could put you in the top 5%.

So, keeping performance constant, attending a lower-performing school gives you a higher chance of being accepted at canonical. How crazy is that?

[roland35]

It is crazy. I believe their thinking though is that people have different opportunities, so you should have basically risen to the top at whatever place you were. Yes it is nonsense!

[emamoah]

The fact that you'd use that number to automatically disqualify candidates is just insane. It doesn't give you a globally objective measure of a person's performance, because, like I stated, it depends on the competition in their particular group.

I could objectively be better at math than John from another school. But MY school is extremely competitive, so I'm probably in top 20%. But John doesn't have much competition in his school, so he might be in the top 10% in HIS school. But your system will reject me because I'm in the top 20%, and probably accept John because he's in the top 10%. Total absurdity!