The admissions are based on academics, extra-curricular activities, and personality.

I can understand how #2 is important, but #3 is ripe for personal bias.

A high bar, with people passing it entering lottery quotas is a far fairer way of having both diversity, and removing personal bias from the equation.

Absolutely this.

Academic performance is mostly a disqualifier to figure out if someone would be successful enough. Harvard, doesn't really care about the GPA of its existing students which is why they also don't care about grade inflation. They're looking for signals that you'll succeed outside of academia. If you want to go to Harvard, stop looking at the application as a checklist. The best applicants are differentiated beyond the classroom.

Sure that's why they have an entire category called extra curriculars, which Asian applicants also do well on. The only category they score low on is personality, which measures, through a half hour interview, such lofty ideals as courage and leadership. It's obviously just there so Harvard can give a subjective score to balance out their racial ratios.

> They're looking for signals that you'll succeed outside of academia

You mean signals like parental wealth?

> Academic performance is mostly a disqualifier to figure out if someone would be successful enough

Really?

Harvard has around 1000 admissions spots in any year. I think there are roughly 30,000 people who score a SAT 2200+ in a given year. Say half of those a have A level GPA. At that point there's more significant non-academic differences, than academic differences.

I think we would agree that non-academic considerations are important. I wouldn't say that academic performance is a disqualifier, which makes it sounds like there's an inverse correlation between academic performance and success.