> So, while obviously objective exams aren't "meritocracy", they are without doubt more meritocratic than not having objective exams.

This is where we disagree dramatically. And this is why it is so frustrating to have people tell me that I "hate excellence" for supporting policy changes. By holding this assumption it enables you to both

1. Hold that meritocracy is an ideal

2. Conclude that people pushing for changes must oppose meritocracy

But I simply do not agree. To me, admissions exams are like the Leetcode interviews that people decry here. The test something, but that thing is largely disconnected from actual work and instead just becomes an obstacle course.

> If "these people" really wanted to move towards greater meritocracy (as opposed to abandoning meritocracy), they'd support things like, abolishment of "extracurricular activities" in college admissions, or legacy admissions, or maybe even things China's limit on the amount of tutoring kids can do (I personally thing this is both too extreme and ultimately counterproductive, but at least we can all agree that it's with the right goal in mind - increasing meritocracy).

I am involved in local politics to change the admissions program for a public magnet school. "Woke" activists proposed a merit lottery, a system where all students who met a minimum GPA and math-level requirement could be entered into a random lottery for admissions. This was criticized by opponents for being "anti-meritocratic" and even "racist against asians".

The eventually enacted policy maintains a "holistic" application, which does not consider race but does include these other topics. This received precisely the same criticism from opponents. Activists on the "woke" side preferred the merit lottery to this outcome.

So what I see here is that activists, at least in the situations that I am personally involved in, do support things like the abolishment of extracurricular activities in admissions systems.

Without more information about the specific case, it's impossible to determine which side was actually supporting meritocracy and which was simply promoting their political cause disguised as meritocracy.

What was the minimum GPA? Who can apply? Are admissions limited to a geographical area or not? Who determines the GPA? If the answer is "teachers", how easily can that be gamed? Why not a similar but much more objective and harder to game system, e.g. admissions exam followed by a random selection above a, say, 80% cutoff point (e.g. first narrow the pool with an exam, then halve it again randomly)?

> but that thing is largely disconnected from actual work and instead just becomes an obstacle course.

This assertion is AFAIK quite nebulous. SATs and similar tests are correlated with IQ and with probability someone finishes university and with later life outcomes. Some say that high school GPA are better predictors, which might be true, but the real question is, how easy are they to game? A metric is only really useful if it doesn't change substantially when it becomes a goal. You might disagree regarding SATs (there's quite some disagreement and proper research into this topic is both hard and very politicised) but whatever other solutions you're proposing, should first be assessed based on how subjective (easy to manipulate/game) they are.

Same thing as Leetcode interviews, really. Everyone knows they suck, noone has come up with anything better yet.

3.5 GPA and enrollment in Algebra I in 8th grade. Admissions are geographical because the school is a public school in Fairfax County, though students from neighboring counties can apply and attend.

Of course GPA isn’t flawless. You’ll find that activists also seek to solve pipeline problems at lower grades. But this is a rapid retreat from “an objective measure is obviously better” to “this specific measure is better than proposed alternatives.”

Using exam score cutoffs was discussed. Generally, people prefer gpa to exams because there isn’t the same explicit cottage industry of exam prep (yes, private tutoring obviously exists) and it includes a wider range of material than what is included on the test. Exam score cutoffs was also deemed unacceptable and similarly called racist and destructive by the same opponents of the proposed policy.

Having thought about this a while longer, I've changed my mind.

I don't really see any purpose in randomization, except anti-meritocracy pro-diversity. It is potentially excusable at the edges to account for the inherent noise of measurement (i.e. is 3.4 GPA really that different from 3.6 GPA) but there's no real reason that someone with 4 GPA shouldn't have a greater shot at admission than someone with 3.5 GPA.

Of course, if your distrust in GPA is so great that you oppose even that, then... what even the point of GPA in the first place? We should be working towards improving the metrics, not eliminating them.

But otherwise, this whole randomisation business is like, "Would you like to be operated on by the surgeon, or by the nurse? Oh, wait, let's flip a coin."

> But otherwise, this whole randomisation business is like, "Would you like to be operated on by the surgeon, or by the nurse? Oh, wait, let's flip a coin."

We are discussing high school education admissions right now. The kids being evaluated are 13. What is schooling for? Do admissions exist to make sure that some unqualified kid never gets access to a strong education? That conservative approach can make sense for life-or-death interactions like surgery, but nobody dies if a "less qualified" kid is sent to TJ (actually, since suicide rates have increased as the school has gotten more competitive, it might actually save lives).

GPA measures several things at the same time. It most explicitly measures what you have done. But in admissions we want some measure of future potential. This is not aligned perfectly with what somebody has done in the past. Were we to change grading to a continuous evaluation of future potential then I'd be much more accepting of a stricter hierarchy in admissions, but I am extremely skeptical that such a metric would be achievable without introducing tremendous biases.

My GPA in middle school was about a 4.0. But when I review my life, the reason it was so high included many many things that were unrelated to my future potential as a student.

We can also take a step back and consider why we even have limited-access accelerated education in the first place. GMU is just down the street. Even discussing the idea of opening up accelerated education to anybody who wants it is also considered being "an enemy of excellence" by opponents.

Finally, your note about surgeons and nurses is interesting, given the history. Prior to understanding of germ theory, it would have been preferable to be operated on by a nurse. Obviously, this is an extreme example but it clearly demonstrates how widespread understanding of "merit" can actually be totally broken.

I think we share a lot of frustrations regarding the present state of the education system, but I still don't understand exactly what part randomisation is supposed to solve (except your anecdotal point about suicides, which I would easily counter with equally anecdotal or suicide rates might increase further as you'd be adding stress of randomisation on top of stress of performance). It appears to me that a lot of the problems you highlight would actually be solved with more/better metrics (including SATs / IQ tests, as these predict future performance).

I agree though that there's no good reason for gatekeeping education. In fact, in my ideal world, you'd have per-subject fast tracks available for anyone (or, more generally, non-age-specific schooling). For example, I always excelled at (and was interested in) math (other subjects, like physics and chemistry, I just excelled at but wasn't that interested in), so I think both I (individually, in future earnings) and the society (collectively, in future value/invention/...) would benefit tremendously if I was given harder math classes at an earlier age. There's a lot of kids like me, and in other subjects as well. But this would require better metrics and identifying such students earlier (even without any rate-limiting, simply to identify talent and steer it in the right direction).

Randomization expands access to qualified students who cannot access the same preparatory material or have divergent mental behaviors that do not hinder their ability to learn but do impact their ability to take tests.

The recent admitted class for TJ has seen absolutely enormous increases in the population of economically disadvantaged students as well as students on the autism spectrum or with other neuroatypical situations.

It therefore (in my mind) provides a more just system of allocation limited access to accelerated education, while we live in a world with such limited access.

> I agree though that there's no good reason for gatekeeping education. In fact, in my ideal world, you'd have per-subject fast tracks available for anyone (or, more generally, non-age-specific schooling).

My experience has been that promoting these policies receives even greater criticisms that me and my friends are racists who hate excellence. It is ridiculous to me that FCPS has a gated system for accelerated learning when there is a commuter-focused college right there. But if I go to school board meetings and suggest that we take resources and allocate them for this purpose, I'm called an "asian-hater".

My family saw a similar thing happen to them many years ago. The local GT programs were drawing students only from a select few (almost entirely white) schools and it turned out that a lot of this was due to how students were identified as candidates. My parents sought to change things, which did not deny any access to white students but instead expanded access and funding so that simply more people had access to accelerated education and... my parents were called "white traitors" by neighbors.

This is why I get so worked up about this stuff when people claim that support for a particular form of admissions exam is by definition support for promoting merit or promoting excellence.

A "Merit lottery" is a half measure when a true lottery is the least discriminatory way to go about things. Every position within society should just be to do a true lottery everywhere such an idea can be applied.

Water treatment plant workers? President? Honors program students? All of these roles are subject to countless forms of discrimination against people for lacking intelligence, lacking the right identity, lacking educational attainment, lacking all sorts of things.

Is this supposed to be a sarcastic argument against the merit lottery?

What I tire of this "faux egalitarian, faux equality of opportunity, meritocracy" stuff which almost invariably discriminates against the less intelligent while trying to establish equality over an arbitrary list of attributes such as race or ethnicity or gender or sexual orientation which have been deemed to be especially important, whereas discrimination against the lazy and unintelligent is taken for granted as righteous, and discrimination against the unattractive and short is tolerable. This is in spite of the fact people are born lazy, stupid, short, and ugly, and this will never change.

Thus the only two resolutions I see to the problem are simply thus. Kill absolutely everybody, thus establishing perfect equity and equality. The other solution is to use lotteries absolutely everywhere except for perhaps a special class of lottery runners (an unfortunate meritocracy), in dating, in work, in schooling, that made it so that everybodies outcomes in life was absolutely arbitrary, and thus equal and equitable.

Again, is this supposed to be a sarcastic argument against the approach?

Ideas like merit lottery are very interesting and worthy of consideration on rational, liberal, universalist grounds, some of which you've hinted at here.

Sadly, when they are promoted on the grounds of obtuse academic wokeness or identity politics, people instinctively infer that the real goal of such policies is to hand out undeserved benefits to minorities at the expense of a legitimate meritocracy.

If it were merely instinct then I’d expect op eds calling supporters racists and “enemies of excellence” to stop after some time, but they haven’t.

We've heard, and continue to hear, vastly, vastly more about the identity politics grounds than the more worthy ones, and in my observation, that's not entirely or even mostly the fault of the critics of merit lottery. It took me years to find any sustained, serious public promotion of the good reasons to do these things.

Instead, what made headlines was garbage like "I just don’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group [Asians] owns admission to these [selective] schools" from the NYC school chancellor. A clear attitude that all racial groups are entitled to proportional representation in selective schools regardless of performance.

I suspect that this is because op eds are deliberately drumming up rage.

Have you spent time with activist groups?

Carranza got lots of support for his attitude, including from a majority of the NYC city council. So I question the idea that the identity politics angle is all being drummed up from the ether by the media, and I'm frankly suspicious when people are so eager to downplay this obvious and very influential phenomenon. If people want to tolerate it for coalitional reasons, sure whatever, but let's not pretend it isn't happening.