The Meritocratic Mirage: Why 'Merit' has become Costly, Useless and Unfair

Imagine you are invited for an interview and you are expected to prove your worth, your experience spanning several years, your skills and your knowledge in an hour. You feel it is unfair, that it is insufficient time to fully prove yourself. You would feel the same even if you attended six rounds of interviews.

Consider another scenario: you are a budding entrepreneur, trying to sell an idea to a potential investor, in a classic elevator pitch. You again argue that this is insufficient, with all the distractions and pressure, you haven’t conveyed the nuances or the breadth of your idea effectively.

These are tough, stressful situations for even grown-up adults to navigate. Yet these pale in front of what we put our kids through in the name of board exams. We are expecting a child, who is still figuring out who they are, to secure proof of their worth in the form of a numerical figure on a scoring sheet by a stranger.

The fourteen years of academic toil, thousands of hours of sleep-deprived studies that the kid undergoes end up being liquidated in a 30-second glance of an assessor. And this is the dynamic the whole generation responds to. They stop thinking, give up on fresh ideas and start mimicking. Originality has become a liability. After all it is their future they are putting at risk.

Ironically this is the exact antithesis of what society needs in an AI-driven, volatile future. It is obvious that this feels unfair to the child. But for society, the rot runs deeper. An entire industry of institutions is built around this; its products are so entrenched in our processes that we struggle to look past it.

By the time we realize that the credentials no longer track the capabilities or skills that genuinely matter, we will have squandered the opportunity to nurture the next generation and handicapped our future.

The solution is not just better exams or tougher syllabi or tweaking of grading curves. In Donella Meadow’s Twelve Leverage Points, these are merely low-level parameter interventions. They do not alter system behavior and typically gets overcome by other system dynamics. The ever-burgeoning industry of degree factories and coaching centers bears witness to this.

Here is the simplest fix we can do today: Get rid of coordinated, fixed-schedule exams and let students take tests whenever they feel personally ready, like say for instance in a driver license exam. A single fixed date punishes the child who was sick, grieving, or simply stuck in traffic, and none of it ever shows up in the score we use to judge her.

You ask, “If kids take exams on different days, surely the questions have to be different. If so, how can we compare whether a student is better or worse than the other”. But this question exposes the core pathology of our current system. Humans are highly complex and their abilities and value to society multi-faceted, and cannot be scored or sorted.

The obsession with grading and sorting people is merely a modern artifact of the industrial revolution’s need for uniform labor and the invention of IQ tests that falsely flatten diverse spectrum of intelligence into a single, sortable number.

Sure enough there are domains, where a better or worse comparison is required but common examinations or degree enrollments are not among them. Those sit closer to the actual jobs and let the market dynamics decide the selection mechanisms. For example in SWE, traditional university degrees gave way to LeetCode tests, which in turn is being phased out by more authentic, task-based selection mechanisms.

The true, deeper (and harder) leverage lies in challenging the validity of “merit” as we currently understand and use. This is what Donella Meadows calls a paradigm shift - a total transformation of the core, unspoken assumptions we hold about human worth.

When we shift the underlying paradigm, other high leverage solutions will follow such as changing the goals of the system (valuing multi-dimensional portfolios over degrees) or fixing the information asymmetry (replacing low-resolution grades with authentic evidence of skill).

None of this will be easy. The current education machinery has a massive, industrial momentum, powered by entrenched gatekeepers and institutions that profit deeply from the current status quo. Because these current ways of working are calcified into the way we think and operate, it is paramount that we aim for a paradigm shift rather than hacking away at low leverage parameters. It may sound abstract and high theory, but all we need to do is open our eyes and see the obvious gaps and misfires.

Imagery assisted by Google’s Nano Banana generative models.