It isn't mandatory, but it certainly helps when you can pay for private tutors or professional consulatants that craft your application package. Students that tend to score high on SATs tend to come from higher income brackets. It also hurts when you attend a school that doesn't offer an expansive list of AP courses, or if you come from a family that never attended college and do not even know what the college process is like.

Edit: To your "This is patently untrue" comment. Taking AP courses and scoring 5s on the exams is pretty standard for applicants getting into elite colleges. By not taking those courses you are huritng yourself when applying to such places.

> It also hurts when you attend a school that doesn't offer an expansive list of AP coursess

This is patently untrue.

The rest of youe post is accurate, although the words help and hurt are the keys to keeping it accurate. None of these things are required.

I worked at a small liberal arts college for a few years that basically admitted (1) legacy students, (2) rich kids, (3) sports kids from the South (from states with no D3 football, basically), and (4) poor kids who got high SAT scores. They used (1) for history, (1) and (2) for revenue, (3) for school spirit, and (4) to boost the average SAT for the whole student body.

So many schools are doing exactly what you suggest. It is kind of weird to teach there & realize pretty quickly that the rich kids are mostly not the smart ones, to be blunt.