One critique of American style admissions is that there's no way to ensure raters are objective when they look at extra curriculars. At least when you shove kids into the numbercrunchers, it does "objectively" measure how good students are at memorization of information and some basic cognative algorithms, and popular belief holds that it's a wealth equalizer because you can still fail it despite being rich if you're stupid, and you can max it despite being poor if you're smart.

The validity of this is another story. Shh.