This is less a matter of “currently” than of type of college. Some colleges, particularly state flagship public universities like the University of Minnesota, don’t care at all about recommendation letters or essays. There’s no place in the application to include those things.
Other schools practice “holistic” admissions, which means they take all of these things into consideration. Lets look at what admissions officers gain from each of these application pieces:

• Transcript: Your grades in individual classes show your level of mastery of the material in those classes. Some students just do better in STEM classes than they do in English/history, or vice versa. Your cumulative GPA gives a feeling for how you do overall in the context of your school. Your transcript also shows the amount of rigor of your high school program. Have you taken the hardest classes available to you?
  
  
• Standardized test scores: Your SAT and ACT (and, in some cases, SAT subject tes