How would you judge that, though? And how much 'potential' is actually realised by the place you go to - faculty and facilities influence outcome (access to sup

How would you judge that, though? And how much 'potential' is actually realised by the place you go to - faculty and facilities influence outcome (access to supercomputers, for example) and maybe the only thing distinguishing a good student from stanford and someone from maryland is the bias in faculty: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005 http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005. In that case, most potential candidates are virtually similar, and some sort of affirmative action is required to balance out the gender pool.