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Comment by seventhtiger | Hacker News Reader

You're starting with the assumption that you can't buy merit. But you absolutely can. At every opportunity in my life where the resources available to me did not support further growth, someone else could have bought more merit. It's still a meritocracy when that person is selected.

What it isn't is a pontetial-ocracy or a inherent-worth-ocracy, and I don't understand the argument for those models.

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And you are starting with the assumption that admissions should reward merit rather than produce it. If a public school is not intended to convert potential to merit, I don't know what is. A school is not actually an "-ocracy" of any kind and this is a weird semantic argument.

If one were going to take a fundamentalist view of merit and exclude potential (again, weird choice for a school!) it would be especially important to define what merit it is you think you can measure. Are you sure the test (+ prep system) do that well? Does spending money on a specialized prep that improves your score translate to producing the merit you are talking about? Or are you retroactively defining merit as "the thing you can measure", because measuring is itself the appealing part?

I would agree with you if this were the national or even regional model, such as the case in some countries in East Asia. But it's not. This is a single school with a unique model that has proved succcessful and is being torn down. No one was being denied a highschool education or a chance to succeed over this.

Questioning the measurement of merit is easy when you don't have to offer an alternative. There's always something to pick at in every methodology, including every alternative you may think of.

If test scores didn't correlate to academic performance that would be embarrassing and really easy to show. But they do. Test prep is just focused studying. It doesn't have any hacks or shortcuts other than learning the material better.

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