> almost all the undergrad students at elite schools are elite students. Based on my own experience at an elite school (as a graduate student, teaching undergr

> almost all the undergrad students at elite schools are elite students. Based on my own experience at an elite school (as a graduate student, teaching undergrads), this is definitely false. > Why are people so willing to accept that from childhood leagues to professional, in basketball, football, soccer, etc. society scours and finds all the best players, and nobody is out to prove that it's not true, but that somehow we as a society are incapable doing it in intellectual fields? Because athletic performance can be objectively and reasonably easily measured along many (not all) dimensions. Intellectual performance is (1) much harder to measure objectively and (2) much less socially acceptable to use such measurements. Good grades can indicate high intellectual performance, or they can indicate grade inflation. A high SAT score can indicate high intellectual ability, or it can indicate that your parents paid $4000 for SAT prep courses and 1-on-1 tutoring. Basing college acceptance on a battery of psychological tests might be somewhat better than current methods at selecting elite students, but (1) those tests would immediately become the subjects of a new test-prep industry and (2) it's not socially acceptable to do that.