I graduated from highschool 20+ years ago (1997, holy smokes!) and it was the same deal then. There were about 25 of us in my graduating class that ran the table with perfect SATs, 5s on all our APs, perfect GPA, etc and we all applied to pretty much all the Ivies. It was arbitrary who got in where, no rhyme or reason as far as we could tell then. Sounds like it hasn't changed much.