merit doesn't mean equal wealth spending to obtain a result. And it's not black and white.

Someone rich spending a lot of money to obtain tutoring doesn't necessarily make their score higher, and there's also diminishing returns. Someone poor who do not afford private tutoring can also receive good score due to their natural talent and/or hard work in self-teaching/practicing.

> universal SAT tutoring available to everyone in order to be more meritocratic.

and that is now called school isnt it? Everybody gets at least some minimal standard of schooling.

The fact is, meritocratic is meant to describe the opposite of nepotistic (or sometimes hereditary/aristocratic). Under a nepotistic system, no matter what you do, you cannot succeed without becoming the in-group somehow.

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TheOtherHobbes a day ago | parent | next [-]

Someone rich spending a lot of money to obtain tutoring will make their score higher if they have any kind of aptitude. Likewise if they have easy access to books, extra study resources, a quiet space for study, no family distractions or challenges, and so on.

Poor people typically have none of those extra resources. Some poor people with extreme talent will be able to overcome the challenges of relative poverty, but others with equal talent won't.

It's extremely hard to create a true meritocratic system, and Gaokao certainly isn't it.

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jimbokun a day ago | parent | next [-]

It’s still meritocratic in the sense of picking the people most capable of performing well in a higher academic setting.

It’s unfair. But nonetheless true that students who were better able to prepare due to superior resources are nonetheless better prepared.

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Ekaros a day ago | parent | prev [-]

So wouldn't it then be fairest to punish kids with high income or high wealth parents? Say set median household income. If parents make double this the score is automatically halved. If they make half it is doubled. Same on gross wealth. More wealth there is bigger the cut.

This would mean that says Musk's kids would need to get sufficiently higher scores than children of someone with no wealth.

	▲	jimbokun a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This would just result in admitting students who weren’t prepared to handle the material.
	▲	robcohen a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If you had that system, and I was Elon Musk's kids, I would feel entirely justified in paying half the taxes society expects me to pay. Let's see if that logic works both ways.

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Avicebron a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Someone rich spending a lot of money to obtain tutoring doesn't necessarily make their score higher, and there's also diminishing returns. Someone poor who do not afford private tutoring can also receive good score due to their natural talent and/or hard work in self-teaching/practicing.

If these are outliers it isn't really meritocratic. If there 100 desired spots that are allocated by the exam, and 1000 students, and wealth (tutors/extra time etc) moves the needle enough to make a meaningful difference, it's basically nepotistic just the in-group is who's parents can afford it. Depending on where you are this can compound each generation.

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adrian_b a day ago | parent | next [-]

Tutoring can provide some advantage to the richer, but at least in my anecdotal experience I have never seen the advantage provided by tutors being able to match what really motivated poorer students could achieve by self study, at least not in the countries where in the past there was good access to public libraries, or today there may exist cheap Internet access.

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close04 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> If these are outliers it isn't really meritocratic.

Merit is about demonstrated ability, not how much effort, time, or money was put into getting the ability.

As long as you convert money into ability and ability into results, that's merit. Nepotism is when you convert money directly into results, buying a score.

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jimbokun a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In the US at least most schools take into account both test scores and social economic factors.

	▲	14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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genthree a day ago | parent | prev [-]

That it tends to become a caste system with extra steps (which steps provide a defense of the system as “fair”) is one of the chief criticisms of meritocracy (and criticism of the idea is where we got the term itself)

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jimbokun a day ago | parent [-]

So as a society do we want to have people performing tasks based on demonstrated aptitude to perform those tasks, or to have people performing tasks based on achieving certain social and political outcomes?

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genthree 19 hours ago | parent [-]

The entire point of any such system is the latter thing anyway, regardless of how you go about it. I mean the higher-level point, like “why do we have any system at all?”

	▲	chii 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> regardless of how you go about it i very much beg to differ. A poor but high aptitude student today is able to escape the "caste" they're born into. Under a true nepotistic system, this cannot happen no matter how much aptitude he/she possesses.

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Geezus_42 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I think the point is that some start with an advantage when it comes to earning merit because by luck of birth they were born to parents with a lot of wealth.

I don't think you can have a truly meritocratic system unless everyone starts on a level playing field with the same access to resources. That is not a system that exists anywhere on this planet.

	▲	jimbokun a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		To achieve that you need to implement some kind of Harrison Bergeron system.
	▲	chii 12 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> a truly meritocratic system only if you twist what you mean by meritocracy to mean equality. Why don't you apply that exact same argument but to sports and athletics? People born with superior genes do perform better (ala, tall people in basketball). Merit doesn't mean everyone starts at the same spot. Merit means your outcome is determined by how good you are at it - no matter how you get to become that good.