Unfair Meritocracy

I’ve just recently read an article in TheStar about something that is usually bandied about as meritocracy. Then, there has been a recent blog entry that showed the results of the “meritocracy” based university entry system that was imposed several years ago.

meritocracy
n 1: a form of social system in which power goes to those with superior intellects
2: the belief that rulers should be chosen for their superior abilities and not because of their wealth or birth

From the second definition of the word above, the real problems with meritocracy are evident. A person’s intellect/abilities can never be disconnected from the circumstances of their birth or wealth. If one argues that nature (i.e. genes) determines our intellect/abilities, then birth circumstance plays a role. If one argues that nurture (i.e. upbringing) determines it, then wealth will certainly play a role. Therefore, I present that true meritocracy can never exist.

Once we accept the fact that meritocracy does not exist, then we can get that out of the way and think about the real problems in Malaysia. With regards to the Malaysian education context, this term is usually applied to the inequality in scholarship disbursement and university admissions. Our problem is the perceived inequalities that seem to be endemic in the system, due to racial profiling. This has nothing to do with meritocracy at all. It has to do with the concept of fairness, which is an interesting study to economists.

Most people come up with a very simplistic (whilst unfair) solution to the problems. They often call for scholarship disbursements to be given based solely on academic performance and university entrance to be based on only one standardised exam. Both these solutions are thoroughly flawed as it depends on one single thing – an accurate examination system.

Anyone who knows standardised examination systems will see this problem. Every standardised exam is prepared by a team of humans, all of whom are fallible. They are in turn, taken by a large number of fallible humans and marked by a number of equally fallible humans under impossible time constraints. So, if the exam questions, examination and examiners are all fallible, then so are the results.

As the root problem is perceived unfairness, I suggest using technology to solve the problem. None of you should be surprised with this by now!

I suggest that the clearing houses for scholarships and university admissions, set up websites for people to make applications. Provide an interface that will allow the applicants to quickly sort and filter the data by different criteria so that they themselves can see where they stand, as compared to the rest of their cohort. The criteria should not include things like race/gender/religion or any such personal matters. Obviously, any identifiable things should be removed as well, like IC numbers and such.

Then, on one final day/week, allow each applicant to vote for which ranking criteria they think should be used as a measure. The idea of this exercise is to let the students themselves decide on what is “fair” and “meritocratic”. If someone thinks that academic results should be used, then let them vote on that. If someone thinks that some other criteria should be used, then let them vote on that instead. At the end of the day, the computer will tabulate the results and make offers based on the available places and who has “won” the vote.

This is just a rough idea and of course, if it is to be implemented, people with the relevant expertise should design the specific criteria and voting system. I would certainly be interested to see the results of this peer-reviewed scholarship award and admissions process. I wonder if it would change anything at all. In the end, the people who get offers will be the ones deemed to deserve them, by their own peers. There is full transparency involved and everyone should be happy (or not).

PS: We may just discover that the fairest method to use when deciding on making offers, is the venerable Monte Carlo method.

In case nobody got it. I wanted to point out that there is no such thing as meritocracy nor fairness in this world.