Most NESCAC schools (Williams, Amherst, Hamilton, Trinity, Bowdoin, Bates, Colby, Middlebury, Tufts), give their coaches a number of "golden tickets" for athletic recruits who meet minimum, but quite high, academic standards. The UAA is another top D3 academic conference (NYU, Carnegie Mellon, Brandeis, Emory, UChicago, Case Western, Wash St. Louis) whose members mostly follow similar recruiting policies to the NESCAC.
A lot depends on the culture of the school, the nature of the alumni base (often based on endowment and level of post-graduation alumni involvement), and how much emphasis they historically put on athletics. So while MIT is less inclined to help recruited athletes, at the other end of the scale Johns Hopkins acts more like a D1 school in terms of the disparity between the test score and GPA requirements for athletes versus the rest of the class (and not just for their D1 Lacrosse program). I think the vast majority of D3 schools still have recruiting policies/programs/quotas, but few have academic exceptions for these athletes.