Or, maybe the admissions committee understands the significance of SAT scores better than you do. From long experience with many students like me, they may have concluded that within their applicant pool, the variations among SAT scores do not predict success at Caltech. They might have found that applicant X having a SAT score delta points higher than applicant Y is just noise and has no predictive power about which will succeed. In my class, about a third of the students who were admitted did not graduate. Many of those who did not finish must have had SAT scores higher than mine.