It is crazy. I believe their thinking though is that people have different opportunities, so you should have basically risen to the top at whatever place you were. Yes it is nonsense!
The fact that you'd use that number to automatically disqualify candidates is just insane. It doesn't give you a globally objective measure of a person's performance, because, like I stated, it depends on the competition in their particular group.
I could objectively be better at math than John from another school. But MY school is extremely competitive, so I'm probably in top 20%. But John doesn't have much competition in his school, so he might be in the top 10% in HIS school. But your system will reject me because I'm in the top 20%, and probably accept John because he's in the top 10%. Total absurdity!
