Would you say UMS is more of a guideline, used to see that quality of an applicant, so it becomes more of a "pass or fail" aspect or do you truly consider an applicant with say 1% UMS more than the next a considerably better applicant?
This may seem like a very vauge and weirdly worded question I feel haha. I mean, is UMS primarily used as a benchmark (i.e. if you get over x% UMS you have as much chance of getting a place as everyone with higher UMS and the exact scores are only considered when comparing various very similar applicants) or is it looked into in much more detail where applicants with higher UMS are considered a much better applicant when looking at only test scores, even if only a couple UMS?
For example, if an applicant got something random like 93.4 UMS, would you just refer to it as within a group such as 90-95 UMS until you need to compare them to a very similar applicant, or is this applicant automatically a much better one than someone with 92 UMS for instance, or would you say these two are too alike to pick one based off of UMS scores to that much detail? The question is basically how much weighting does the exact UMS score actually have, I have a feeling people obsess over them to much and as long as you're comfortably getting >90 UMS you can consider yourself a strong applicant since there's so many aspects of an application to consider.
If I'm correct, does this also mean the teacher reference also has a just as big weighting, as a typical "Best in School" student is a strong applicant almost always.