Tag: meritocracy

Unmasking The Myth of Meritocracy: Sophie Callcott’s Excellent Essay

Sophie Callcott, a junior at Stanford University, has written a solid essay yanking down one corner of the myth of meritocracy in college admissions:  There’s Still One Big Trick for Getting Into an Elite College https://nyti.ms/3y7IWil   Yes, looking at, agreeing with, and promoting this essay are all proof of my obvious confirmation bias when it comes […]

The Baseball Hall Of Fame Is A Meritocracy; Our Society Is A Ganglion Of Oligarchies

Being a baseball fan my whole life, the conversation about yesterday’s most recent Hall of Fame (HOF) induction interested me because I think that institution for whatever its other faults acted in accordance with its meritocratic nature. Critics of yesterday’s election results missing that point also mistake how arguments for admission to a meritocracy should proceed.. To say that […]

Myths of Meritocracy Are Entangled in Myths about Testing

The Uses of Argument by Stephen Toulmin, a foundational text of modern assessment design, the science behind the making of tests, lays out the components of a formal argument that leads to a claim. (And remember the whole reason to have a test is to be able to make some claim about what someone knows […]