Selecting randomly from a cohort already judged good enough is a meritocracy. Perhaps you prefer the French model with a linear ranking nationwide and a cap on how many thousands down from the top can go to the ecole normale superieur?
In Australia we have linear rankings, you're placed in allotments of 0.05%. It does favour the kids from rich backgrounds but the smart kids from poor backgrounds get a good shot at attending a solid university.
Standardised tests measure academic potential, i.e. probability of graduating and likely value added to society from the educational experience, with a fair amount of error. Taking everyone within a standard deviation of the cut-off and randomly selecting therefrom admits this error and removes the stigma from those just below the previous, false cut-off. If one really wanted, and if the statistics merited it, one could use a weighted randomisation, with individuals scoring higher getting an advantage compared to those scoring lower.
Well, it enlarges the error. All you have done is to add an additional source of noise on top of the existing one.
> and removes the stigma from those just below the previous, false cut-off
This it may do, it may well be psychologically easier to accept that you got unlucky on the coin flip rather than unlucky on which topic came up in question 13.
(Not sure what "false" means, the cut-off is a fact of how the system works.)
False as in we don’t know the person ranked 1,001 has less academic potential than the person ranked 999.
We know, with a decent likelihood, that the person ranked 1 has more than the person ranked 750. But someone at 1,250 is quite likely to exceed the academic potential of someone at 900. Hence the “falseness” of the cut-off.
Sure, but this is like insisting that every guy with Olympic gold holds a "false" medal, every time. While the stated rule is that it goes by who crosses the line first on the day, this obviously isn't a perfect measure of who's ultimately really in some other abstract sense the fastest man alive.
I guess the common way of deliberately adding noise is by rounding off scores, such as giving A/B/C instead of rank order. Which means that nobody gets a letter saying that their score (the one from the exam) has rank 1001.
> this is like insisting that every guy with Olympic gold holds a "false" medal, every time
Bad comparison. We have loads of statistics from sports showing there are highly-precise rankings. Run certain races repeatedly and you’ll find persistent rankings. Particularly at the most-competitive levels, where innate biology dominates in most sports.
Have a cohort of students re-take a standardised test a few times, on the other hand, and you’ll get a spread. Try to relate that spread to the things you’re actually trying to measure, academic potential, and it’s a hair better than a crap shoot.
Maybe. I'd hazard a guess that membership of the top 1000 places in a high-stakes national exam might actually be less noisy than a gold medal. That is, on a re-run, what percentage of people keep their top-1000 scores, and (on re-runs of the last 40 years olympics, times 100 individual events, say) what percentage of gold medalists would have kept theirs?
But I have not checked the numbers. Obviously if you restrict attention to those with exam scores near the boundary, you can get different results. And there are indeed other sports scores more precise than the one I mentioned.
You know meritocracy† was coined as term to satirise the problem of promoting "greatness", which is hard to measure and results in promoting conformity and class, as opposed to finding the creative minority who bring real progress?
Nowadays, the term is widely used in a positive way to describe 'creative minorities who bring real progress'.
It is confusing to use the old opposing definition of the word 'meritocracy' when everybody else around you is adhering to the original meaning of 'merit'.
Of course, whether or not we're able to accurately evaluate 'merit' is a decent question, but it is better to ask the question using metrics, than to try to answer using personal bias and satire.
The point of the satire, and the point of TFA, is that measuring 'merit' is difficult, if not impossible, and a focus on 'meritocracy' will lead to promoting those that perform best at the measurable proxies to merit, not actual merit.
It seemed worth pointing out that people are using a word conceived satirically to advocate for the very system that satire warned against. And it's an interesting bit of history.
Every good system need to strive to be a meritocracy, anyone arguing anything else is just talking nonsense. If it is impossible to determine who has more merit then every system is doomed to fail.
Best at 'measurable proxies of merit' is exactly what I think people should speak plainly about and fight for.
But, instead we have people that think that because merit cannot be perfectly measured we should stop attempting to find meritocracy and instead to select randomly.
Random selection must be worse than a measurable proxy.
I gain nothing personally from this system, because I didn't travel through a top college. But I do not think it's in my interests to completely destroy societies way of selecting people into important positions based on some idea of 'merit'.
Wow, I don't think I've ever been accused of Marxist propaganda before. Certainly not before lunchtime.
Okay, I'm going to try and be charitable. I agree that high IQ people create "real progress" and they come from the majority. A good example I expect we would agree on would be Steve Jobs: very smart, responsible for lots of progress.
The problem I see with meritocracy as it exists in the real world, for example, college admissions is that it doesn't reward Steve Jobs. It rewards the smart but boring, the clever but not too clever, the academically bright and socially conservative. When I quoted "minority", I didn't mean that there is some special cadre of people who are better; the quote refers to the fact that only a few people are responsible for human progress. There are plenty of high IQ people, but few Einsteins or Gates or Jobs.
And returning to TFA, it seems obvious that selecting an ever-smaller fraction based on quantifiable measurements doesn't measure merit. I'd argue "merit" is simply not accurately measurable, certainly not on a large enough scale for college admissions.
So the idea of selecting randomly from a fraction of "good enough" is likely to give as good a result, whilst also improving problems of social mobility and possible finding those diamonds in the rough who might have greater "merit" but not be good at standardised testing for whatever reason.
