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One thing I like about China's education system is the Gaokao entrance exams for universities. It doesn't matter if you're rich, poor, ugly, or beautiful. All it matters is how you score. It's as meritocratic as education can be.
Having worked in with Chinese people, they always say it's meaningless.
My first job during and out of college back in 2003, we were entirely remote. We hired exclusively over the phone which resulted in a mix of people that were completely diverse in their backgrounds and at the same time truly qualified to do the work. The company went on to grow quite successfully until it was acquired 6 years later. I feel that zoom and video conferencing allows some of that "appearance" factor back…
For research studies, we slowly revert to on premise physical interviews at work. If we want the ChatGPT answers, we don’t need another human in the loop.
One thing I like about China's education system is the Gaokao entrance exams for universities. It doesn't matter if you're rich, poor, ugly, or beautiful. All it matters is how you score. It's as meritocratic as education can be.
However I've never met anyone from these countries who have a high opinion of their systems. Personally I do think our standardized exams cause massive 'overfitting' issue (borrowed from machine learning). The exam is not as brutal as Korean one though.
YMMV.
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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 tutoring available to everyone in order to be more meritocratic.
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 sen…
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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 ev…
> 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,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 ev…
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.
The phd student who conducted it trawled through students' Facebook pages and took their profile photos (without consent). Then he had a jury of 74 teenagers rate the photos on a scale from 1 to 10. Then he tried to correlate beauty with grades for distance or in-class education. De-anonymizing the data was trivial so everyone could pretty much see how the jury had rated each profile photo. And research data is public.
It was a seriously weak study with questionable methodology and a too low effect-size to draw any conclusions anyway. So no reason to get alarmed if you are ugly. :)
I wonder why the beauty premium remained for males after the switch to online but not in females?
It's easy. For women the core of their power anthropologically lies with beauty. They are judged by it and the core of their power stems from it. That is why there is a beauty industry that centers around women and none for men. That is why women "care" about beauty much more than men. They know that beauty = power. Women rely on beauty for success much more than men. It is not just in terms of "grades". Even in engi…
Oh us men also have a beauty industry - or, I should rather say, an attractiveness industry. We just get sold different, and arguably far more pricier, things... luxury watches and cars, tailor-made suits and shoes, grooming, gym memberships.
And similar to how women got anorexia through unhealthy beauty standards for decades, that comes back to bite us men this time with "looksmaxxers" [1]...
> Clavicular attributes his looks to, among other things, taking testosterone from the age of 14 and smashing his jawbone with a hammer to supposedly reshape his lower face - neither of which is recommended by health professionals.
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One important thing is whether the tutoring is making better students, or just gaming the test.
And after graduation they can grind leetcode, and after that they can practice social cues to get in the management class. It's gamed tests all the way down.
> When education is in-person, attractive students receive higher grades in non-quantitative subjects, in which teachers tend to interact more with students compared to quantitative courses. I wonder how much of this is less about attraction and more about social skills. Granted, higher attraction affords more opportunity to develop those skills, but I have met plenty of charming people who were not conventionally at…