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Comment by Avicebron | Hacker News Reader

> 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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> 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.

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.

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

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)

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?

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?”

> 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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