I took a grad marketing class once with a business professor who studied this sort of thing. GMATs rather than SATs but same idea. Basically GMATs mattered more than anything else especially metrics such as letters of recommendation that were basically worthless.

I knew the director of admissions somewhat at an elite school and he said that they basically put a couple of quantitative metrics (like SAT) on one axis and read essays and considered other metrics like interviews on the other axis for diversity before that term became popular.

The upper right more or less got in, the lower left didn't, and then they debated the middle ground.