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Don’t wealthier families hire tutors to prepare their children? That’s what happens in the US with the SAT/ACT. I think you’d need free, universal SAT tutorin

Don’t wealthier families hire tutors to prepare their children? That’s what happens in the US with the SAT/ACT. I think you’d need free, universal SAT tutoring available to everyone in order to be more meritocratic.

chii 7mo ago
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.
- Avicebron 7mo ago
  > 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.
  - genthree 7mo ago
    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)
    - jimbokun 7mo ago
      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?
      - genthree 7mo ago
        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 7mo ago
        > 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.
  - close04 7mo ago
    > 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.
  - adrian_b 7mo ago
    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.
  - jimbokun 7mo ago
    In the US at least most schools take into account both test scores and social economic factors.
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
- TheOtherHobbes 7mo ago
  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.
  - Ekaros 7mo ago
    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.
    - robcohen 7mo ago
      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.
    - jimbokun 7mo ago
      This would just result in admitting students who weren’t prepared to handle the material.
  - jimbokun 7mo ago
    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.
- Geezus_42 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    To achieve that you need to implement some kind of Harrison Bergeron system.
  - chii 7mo ago
    > 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.
jostmey 7mo ago
It could still be more fair than no standardized testing
prasadjoglekar 7mo ago
Take it to it's logical conclusion. Free universal choice of schools rather than being tethered to your home address.
picture 7mo ago
China has made for-profit extracurricular tutoring illegal since 2021. [1] Of course there can be under the table operations and discussion to be had about regionally biased gaokao difficulty, but I think it's worth recognizing gaokao being a real chance for upward class mobility, hence why it is so competitive. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Reduction_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Reduction_Policy
- ModernMech 7mo ago
  Oh so that explains it! Starting in 2020 when I was a new professor, I was contacted by a company that works with Chinese families to tutor their students directly. I would be paid $400 an hour to teach them online remotely. Originally I thought it was because of COVID lockdowns and that may be part of it. But the opportunities have continued since then. I stopped doing it as my career has become more involved but I still get solicitations from time to time, so it must be because of what you say.
CalRobert 7mo ago
At the very least, it's complicated. I went to an appallingly bad, fundamentalist religious high school (not my choice) that didn't offer extracurriculars, honors classes (never mind AP!) etc. and if I hadn't been able to do exceedingly well on standardized tests I could not have gotten in to the colleges I did. My parents did not pay for any test prep. I did learn and practice on my own though, which is how I know that evolution does not, in fact, teach that you can grow wings if you want them badly enough.
mgfist 7mo ago
Well nothing is truly meritocratic - even with free tutoring, kids will still have different genetics, different home environments, different upbringings etc.. Colleges in the US that removed standardized testing from their applications, in the pursuit of trying to be more meritocratic, found that fewer students from underrepresented backgrounds got in, not more. In hindsight (and to some in foresight) this makes sense because now schools leaned more heavily on grades and extracurriculars, both of which can be gamed by wealthy families far more easily than a standardized test.
- Ekaros 7mo ago
  To me grades sound like easiest thing to tutor for. Especially if homework is involved. Even basic editing and feedback before submissions could make absolutely massive difference.
- jimbokun 7mo ago
  You are confusing meritocracy with egalitarianism.
- mikkupikku 7mo ago
  > Well nothing is truly meritocratic How do you figure? Many things in life are meritocratic. Apply for a job welding, they'll ask you to weld some coupons. If you can do it, you get the job, if you can't then you can't. If your father was a welder or a banker makes no difference, merit is about being able to do the work, not whether life was fair to get you to that skill level.
tyjen 7mo ago
Khan Academy was free and used to obtain 99th percentile SAT scores. Academic resources for success are abundantly available, but they require discipline, time, and effort.
- PurpleRamen 7mo ago
  > Khan Academy was free and used to obtain 99th percentile SAT scores. Is it not free anymore?
mikkupikku 7mo ago
Tutors barely move exam scores, particularly if they're only hired for test prep. You can crush tests without cramming, tutors or any of that if you just pay attention in class and do all optional homework.
- RugnirViking 7mo ago
  you can also make a lot of money buy selling things for more than you bought them for, and lose weight by simply eating less. You can feel better by sleeping more, and going to the gym every day. You can get ahead in your career by becoming great friends with your boss and your boss' boss. It turns out that often it being easy to describe in broad strokes how to do something doesn't make it easy to do in practise.
  - mikkupikku 7mo ago
    Paying attention in class might be a legitimate issue requiring medication for some people, but otherwise it, and doing optional assignments, are a choice.
    - hirvi74 7mo ago
      > Paying attention in class might be a legitimate issue requiring medication for some people Considering I would be classified as a member of this group, let me ask: > but otherwise it, and doing optional assignments, are a choice If attention is a choice, then how reliably can you control your attention based your choice? For the sake of analogy, is being able to control one's attention like controlling one's breathe? As in, one can consciously be aware of and control their breathing to some degree, but without a conscious choice, breathing will still operate in the background. Or is attention something like a voluntary muscle movement which requires explicit intention? I am asking because I have/had little to no control over my ability to focus. Thus, I am curious what it is like for others.
    - RugnirViking 7mo ago
      do you truly in your heart of hearts believe that people simply have the choice to pay attention or not, and simply not? as easy as flipping a switch? and that despite that they choose not to?
WarmWash 7mo ago
The actual problem is that we are not blank slates, and wealthy parents tend to be wealthy because they are more intelligent, and likewise give birth to predisposed-to-be-intelligent babies. I always find it slightly ironic how mother nature gets so much reverence from ostensibly communal types, despite her being the most shamelessly power hungry entity ever conceived.
- simonask 7mo ago
  This take is bafflingly unscientific. You are spewing pure unadulterated ideology here - a particularly ugly one too.
  - WarmWash 7mo ago
    Yes, behavioral genetics is the climate science of the left. If there are PhDs and university departments studying it, I'm not gonna be someone who sticks there head in the sand for the sake of their flavor of political identity.
    - simonask 7mo ago
      [flagged]
      - jimbokun 7mo ago
        What studies support your critiques?
        simonask 7mo ago
        The amount of effort I’m willing to dedicate to counter wild Social Darwinism is very low. Please just do the bare minimum and go to Wikipedia.
      - Jensson 7mo ago
        [flagged]
azan_ 7mo ago
> Don’t wealthier families hire tutors to prepare their children? Effect of tutoring is greatly overstated.
- xigoi 7mo ago
  As a university tutor, I agree. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.
- Jensson 7mo ago
  Tutoring companies don't want you to know that though, so they push these articles saying rich people only get better scores thanks to tutoring.
Manuel_D 7mo ago
Sure, but tutoring involves learning and improving the skills at hand. Meritocracy doesn't mean equal opportunity, it means candidates are evaluated equally without regard to superficial characteristics like appearance. Of course candidates that study more have an advantage. But that doesn't make it non-meritocratic. That'd be like saying a marathon isn't meritocratic because some people spend more time training and conditioning.
Manuel_D 7mo ago
Sure, but tutoring involves learning and improving the skills at hand. Meritocracy doesn't mean equal opportunity, it means candidates are evaluated equally without regard to superficial characteristics like appearance. A meritocratic test will award higher scores to test takers that can read and analyze passages faster and solve math problems more reliability. Whether those test takers possess that ability innately, or built up that ability through loads of studying doesn't alter the fact that it's a meritocratic test. Of course candidates that study more have an advantage. But that doesn't make it non-meritocratic. That'd be like saying a marathon isn't meritocratic because some people spend more time training.

chii 7mo ago

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.

Avicebron 7mo ago
> 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.
- genthree 7mo ago
  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)
  - jimbokun 7mo ago
    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?
    - genthree 7mo ago
      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 7mo ago
        > 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.
- close04 7mo ago
  > 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.
- adrian_b 7mo ago
  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.
- jimbokun 7mo ago
  In the US at least most schools take into account both test scores and social economic factors.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
TheOtherHobbes 7mo ago
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.
- Ekaros 7mo ago
  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.
  - robcohen 7mo ago
    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.
  - jimbokun 7mo ago
    This would just result in admitting students who weren’t prepared to handle the material.
- jimbokun 7mo ago
  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.
Geezus_42 7mo ago
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 7mo ago
  To achieve that you need to implement some kind of Harrison Bergeron system.
- chii 7mo ago
  > 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.

jostmey 7mo ago

It could still be more fair than no standardized testing

prasadjoglekar 7mo ago

Take it to it's logical conclusion. Free universal choice of schools rather than being tethered to your home address.

picture 7mo ago

China has made for-profit extracurricular tutoring illegal since 2021. [1] Of course there can be under the table operations and discussion to be had about regionally biased gaokao difficulty, but I think it's worth recognizing gaokao being a real chance for upward class mobility, hence why it is so competitive. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Reduction_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Reduction_Policy

ModernMech 7mo ago
Oh so that explains it! Starting in 2020 when I was a new professor, I was contacted by a company that works with Chinese families to tutor their students directly. I would be paid $400 an hour to teach them online remotely. Originally I thought it was because of COVID lockdowns and that may be part of it. But the opportunities have continued since then. I stopped doing it as my career has become more involved but I still get solicitations from time to time, so it must be because of what you say.

CalRobert 7mo ago

At the very least, it's complicated. I went to an appallingly bad, fundamentalist religious high school (not my choice) that didn't offer extracurriculars, honors classes (never mind AP!) etc. and if I hadn't been able to do exceedingly well on standardized tests I could not have gotten in to the colleges I did. My parents did not pay for any test prep. I did learn and practice on my own though, which is how I know that evolution does not, in fact, teach that you can grow wings if you want them badly enough.

mgfist 7mo ago

Well nothing is truly meritocratic - even with free tutoring, kids will still have different genetics, different home environments, different upbringings etc.. Colleges in the US that removed standardized testing from their applications, in the pursuit of trying to be more meritocratic, found that fewer students from underrepresented backgrounds got in, not more. In hindsight (and to some in foresight) this makes sense because now schools leaned more heavily on grades and extracurriculars, both of which can be gamed by wealthy families far more easily than a standardized test.

Ekaros 7mo ago
To me grades sound like easiest thing to tutor for. Especially if homework is involved. Even basic editing and feedback before submissions could make absolutely massive difference.
jimbokun 7mo ago
You are confusing meritocracy with egalitarianism.
mikkupikku 7mo ago
> Well nothing is truly meritocratic How do you figure? Many things in life are meritocratic. Apply for a job welding, they'll ask you to weld some coupons. If you can do it, you get the job, if you can't then you can't. If your father was a welder or a banker makes no difference, merit is about being able to do the work, not whether life was fair to get you to that skill level.

tyjen 7mo ago

Khan Academy was free and used to obtain 99th percentile SAT scores. Academic resources for success are abundantly available, but they require discipline, time, and effort.

PurpleRamen 7mo ago
> Khan Academy was free and used to obtain 99th percentile SAT scores. Is it not free anymore?

mikkupikku 7mo ago

Tutors barely move exam scores, particularly if they're only hired for test prep. You can crush tests without cramming, tutors or any of that if you just pay attention in class and do all optional homework.

RugnirViking 7mo ago
you can also make a lot of money buy selling things for more than you bought them for, and lose weight by simply eating less. You can feel better by sleeping more, and going to the gym every day. You can get ahead in your career by becoming great friends with your boss and your boss' boss. It turns out that often it being easy to describe in broad strokes how to do something doesn't make it easy to do in practise.
- mikkupikku 7mo ago
  Paying attention in class might be a legitimate issue requiring medication for some people, but otherwise it, and doing optional assignments, are a choice.
  - hirvi74 7mo ago
    > Paying attention in class might be a legitimate issue requiring medication for some people Considering I would be classified as a member of this group, let me ask: > but otherwise it, and doing optional assignments, are a choice If attention is a choice, then how reliably can you control your attention based your choice? For the sake of analogy, is being able to control one's attention like controlling one's breathe? As in, one can consciously be aware of and control their breathing to some degree, but without a conscious choice, breathing will still operate in the background. Or is attention something like a voluntary muscle movement which requires explicit intention? I am asking because I have/had little to no control over my ability to focus. Thus, I am curious what it is like for others.
  - RugnirViking 7mo ago
    do you truly in your heart of hearts believe that people simply have the choice to pay attention or not, and simply not? as easy as flipping a switch? and that despite that they choose not to?

WarmWash 7mo ago

The actual problem is that we are not blank slates, and wealthy parents tend to be wealthy because they are more intelligent, and likewise give birth to predisposed-to-be-intelligent babies. I always find it slightly ironic how mother nature gets so much reverence from ostensibly communal types, despite her being the most shamelessly power hungry entity ever conceived.

simonask 7mo ago
This take is bafflingly unscientific. You are spewing pure unadulterated ideology here - a particularly ugly one too.
- WarmWash 7mo ago
  Yes, behavioral genetics is the climate science of the left. If there are PhDs and university departments studying it, I'm not gonna be someone who sticks there head in the sand for the sake of their flavor of political identity.
  - simonask 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    - jimbokun 7mo ago
      What studies support your critiques?
      - simonask 7mo ago
        The amount of effort I’m willing to dedicate to counter wild Social Darwinism is very low. Please just do the bare minimum and go to Wikipedia.
    - Jensson 7mo ago
      [flagged]

azan_ 7mo ago

> Don’t wealthier families hire tutors to prepare their children? Effect of tutoring is greatly overstated.

xigoi 7mo ago
As a university tutor, I agree. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.
Jensson 7mo ago
Tutoring companies don't want you to know that though, so they push these articles saying rich people only get better scores thanks to tutoring.

Manuel_D 7mo ago

Sure, but tutoring involves learning and improving the skills at hand. Meritocracy doesn't mean equal opportunity, it means candidates are evaluated equally without regard to superficial characteristics like appearance. Of course candidates that study more have an advantage. But that doesn't make it non-meritocratic. That'd be like saying a marathon isn't meritocratic because some people spend more time training and conditioning.

Manuel_D 7mo ago

Sure, but tutoring involves learning and improving the skills at hand. Meritocracy doesn't mean equal opportunity, it means candidates are evaluated equally without regard to superficial characteristics like appearance. A meritocratic test will award higher scores to test takers that can read and analyze passages faster and solve math problems more reliability. Whether those test takers possess that ability innately, or built up that ability through loads of studying doesn't alter the fact that it's a meritocratic test. Of course candidates that study more have an advantage. But that doesn't make it non-meritocratic. That'd be like saying a marathon isn't meritocratic because some people spend more time training.