I will admit to knowing little about UC Davis except that it is not as famous as Berkeley. But looking at the SAT score ranges of the two schools confirms my statement that Berkeley has more top-notch students.
I'm not sure what "top-notch" means. I suppose that if you judge in the context of industrial metrics and expensive extracurricular activities chosen for admissions appeal, UCB and Ivy League students are "top notch." By
industrial metrics, I mean results on standardized multiple choice tests and inflated grade-point averages.
But I don't think that these metrics are necessarily indicators of what I'd define as a top-notch student. To me, they mostly describe top-prepped students or top-groomed students.
Personally, I see top-notch as meaning that the student is thoughtful and thinks critically about what he reads/hears/sees, can find creative solutions to problems, has a history of being able to follow through on dull stuff as well as interesting stuff, and is very intelligent. Obviously, I'm only talking about undergraduate university admissions here. The definition would be different for different disciplines.
Before 20 or 25 years ago, one of the strengths of the US college admissions system was that colleges looked at these kinds of attributes much more than I suspect they'd admit to now. Yeah, I know there are more people now, but Harvard still got way over 10,000 applications for its freshman class in the early 80s. Today we have an arms race, and the industrial metrics plus extracurricular activityitis have taken over. The result is that we're creating lots of hyper-prepped students who'll suffer (or already have suffered) the way that JonLaw describes.
