But that doesn't make it a "lottery" as claimed in the post I responded to. Every application gets a score and then the ones with the highest scores get offered admission.

If it was a lottery, they'd do a binary classification of "qualified" and "not qualified", and then they'd randomly choose who gets in. IMO that would be an improvement on the current system. Powerball and other big lotteries don't pay out on subjective criteria, each ticket gives you the same chance of winning, with no other information being used.

The randomness is whether the committee reading your essays read them before or after lunch, or if something you wrote reminded them of their first romance, etc. etc. etc. The scores may not be "random" in the truest sense of the word, but the latent state that determine them is unknowable a priori and therefore the scoring ends up being highly stochastic.