The thing is, ordering your student's scores from top to bottom and selecting the Nth best, is going to create a pointlessly competitive system where students strive only to get the best scores and not get actually meaningful education (ex. South Korea, China). Even things like giving more points to extra-curricular activities, volunteers, and good admission essays, are eventually going to be gamed and impose tons of unnecessary stress at the students. (And these additional 'social' metrics can hinder the selection of eccentric intellectuals, since it systematically filters out the ones regarded as "outcasts" and encourage normalcy and complacency among the students).
My proposal is then: the top X% of students based on test scores will probably have roughly similar intellectual skills, and the much more gifted 0.1% of students are not going to be revealed simply through test scores, examinations, or admission essays. So my solution: take the top X% and filter them through a lottery. In that way you can motivate students to achieve a certain baseline minimum while also minimizing the stresses of college admission (although for this to work well you also need to ensure that universities throughout the nation are funded, supported, and operated more equally, so a talented student who failed to get into one of the top-rated schools because of bad luck can still get a decent-enough education, and then transfer to a better school later)
My proposal is then: the top X% of students based on test scores will probably have roughly similar intellectual skills, and the much more gifted 0.1% of students are not going to be revealed simply through test scores, examinations, or admission essays. So my solution: take the top X% and filter them through a lottery. In that way you can motivate students to achieve a certain baseline minimum while also minimizing the stresses of college admission (although for this to work well you also need to ensure that universities throughout the nation are funded, supported, and operated more equally, so a talented student who failed to get into one of the top-rated schools because of bad luck can still get a decent-enough education, and then transfer to a better school later)