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IOW, he completely ignored the "and why?" portion of the cue and got in anyway? Thanks, I had never heard that part of the story before.
For better and worse, university admissions often play pretty fast and loose. The admissions questions are jumping-off points for you to persuade the university that you're interesting and a good long-term investment. They're not a points-based assessment, especially not somewhere like Stanford, and this guy would surely have known that.
In the UK, Oxford has a reputation for having much more interview-based admissions based (in theory) on future potential and interestingness, whereas Cambridge admissions have the reputation of being much more reliant on strict grade ranking and standardised testing. Neither of them is considered a clear winner and both strategies appear to have their pros and cons.
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