That kind of sucks... because let's say you just have the grades to get an interview. You do awesome on the interview and your extracurriculars rock. But if all those people with straight As rock their interview and have awsome extracurriculars like you, there isn't a chance of you ever getting in
Now I'm curious how the girl with the 77 average got in.
Don't let the allocation %'s trick you though..
grades may be a big 50% of the ranking, making the 5% GRE and 5% EC and 10% VE seem much less important by comparison..
however this isn't necessarily the case at all..
what's important is not the gross %'s, but rather how the grades for each item are assigned..
for example, the experience and interview portions are marked subjectively, while the grades are an objective percentage..
This means that the variability might be much larger within the 10% vet exp portion than it is within the 50% grades portion.
So let's say the lowest realistic average somebody might have who is interviewed is 77, and the highest is 90, if we convert that at 50% to points, the person with the better average has only a margin of 6.5 pts on the person with the lower average..
Now, if vet experience and extracurr are marked subjectively and the committee marks with great variability (giving some 1/5's and 5/5's and 3/10's and 9/10's etc), then it won't take a miracle for the person with a 77 average to get ahead of the person with a 90 average, if they have significantly better experience..
It took a while before i figured this out, but it is really all to do with the variability and standard deviation within each admission element that makes one element more or less important..
the way i understand it, the variability within academic grades is realistically going to be around 2-3.5 points MAX.
The variability within each of the other admission elements is presumably much greater than that...
Therefore: Marks don't matter as much as you think. Not even close.
I wish somebody would prove me wrong about this theory, but I suspect I'm right...