But Hoss Bonaventure's son was easily in the top 10-20% of applicants in BYU's application ranking system, unless the Bishop or seminary teacher actually did not endorse. It's impossible that the essays were so bad that his overall score was worse than many of the students who actually got accepted. I think it's pretty clear based on some of the stories we've heard that BYU is intentionally capping its enrollment of students meeting certain academic profiles. Maybe it's to intentionally "diversify" the student body. Maybe it's to encourage a certain number of talented LDS kids to attend other universities instead of consolidating them all in one place. The people reading the essays are probably told that they have to pick a certain number or percentage of these top-scoring applicants to reject. I am sure that they put a ton of effort into that decision. But two different sets of judges would probably pick different sets of students to reject, so it feels really random.