I understand what you believe to be true, but I'm not speaking from a hypothetical perspective. I've seen the 3.6 MIT student get rejected, while a 4.0 student from a "lesser" school gained admission. It happens.
As I said, a high GPA from MIT isn't going to hurt you, but it's not a golden ticket, either. If nothing else, grad schools like the GRE because it's a standardized metric. Still, neither GRE score nor GPA are particularly good predictors of success in graduate school, and the committees know this.
I think we possibly have a different understanding of what is a lesser or second tier school. I based my opinion on the original poster's response to pg's comment, where he states that his cs program is like "trade school". I doubt that a 4.0 from such a program would count for much in comparison to an applicant from a top CS department.
As for your anecdotal example, could it not be that the other factors were the deciding ones in this case (like the student from the lesser school having much stronger recommendations or published a paper)? In any case, all I meant by making up this 3.6/4.0 example was that the school matters too.
If I read you correctly, you also seem to be saying that GRE scores are more important than GPA. This is not true at all. In fact GRE scores count for very little compared to your GPA (which counts less than recommendations and research). Remember that we are discussing admission to top-tier schools. MIT does not even consider the GRE in their admission procedure.
Also, what makes you assume that I'm talking from a hypothetical perspective? At my undergrad school, I have personally known about 50 people who've applied and gone to grad school, and GPA correlates very strongly with the ranking of the department they joined. Since then these views have been confirmed by the faculty (including my advisor) that I have talked to at my grad school.
In any case, we have our grad recruiting weekend coming up next week, and I'll do some field research and report back :)
My post was based on my own knowledge of the recruiting process (and the background of many fellow grad students) a top-tier school:
1) GPA and GRE scores are typically the basis for an include/exclude decision to filter a large pool of applicants down to a smaller pool. They don't typically play a primary role in determining the ranking of the candidates after this step. That's a far more holistic (read: subjective) decision.
2) In terms of #1, committees tend to weight both GPA and GRE equally, with a slight preference given to the GRE, because it is the only direct quantitative comparison available between all applicants.
But this debate is mostly navel-gazing, because admissions committees are famously capricious; the exact method used depends on the members of the committee, and their particular biases. The only point I'm trying to make here is that your chances to get admitted to a top-tier school aren't necessarily higher if you went to MIT as an undergrad. That's a myth that is dearly loved -- by MIT undergrads.
(And by the way? Two seconds of googling tells me that you're wrong about MIT and the GRE:
First, I really don't understand what we are arguing about here, since my initial comment already says that research and recommendations are much more important than GPA and GRE. Lets just agree to disagree on the rest.
Second, I never questioned the basis of your opinions, you questioned mine (indirectly).
Finally, maybe you should have spent more than two seconds googling, since MIT CS does not ask for your GRE scores. See the relevant part in this document (which is available on the page you linked):
http://web.mit.edu/admissions/graduate/pdfs/MIT_department_i...
(Edit: Did you go to grad school in CS? Because otherwise the whole discussion loses relevance.)
It's true that you do generally have to take the GRE to get into MIT grad school, but it's not really what you're being admitted based on (although you might be rejected for sucking).
It's funny to even see an MIT-wide admissions page, since it's department based, and especially so for CS students.
As I said, a high GPA from MIT isn't going to hurt you, but it's not a golden ticket, either. If nothing else, grad schools like the GRE because it's a standardized metric. Still, neither GRE score nor GPA are particularly good predictors of success in graduate school, and the committees know this.