Merit

The word “meritocracy” was coined in a satirical sense. In 1958, Michael Dunlop Young invented the term in his book, The Rise of the Meritocracy, which criticized the United Kingdom’s education system by describing a dystopian future in which merit is valued above all else, creating a society divided between the merited, powerful elite and the lower class of the less merited. 

We’ve since dropped the sardonic edge of the word. Maybe merit is, as the leader of the College Board suggests, a matter of resourcefulness. Maybe it’s “IQ + Effort,” as Young defined it. And maybe it’s something more elusive, something that serves as a justification for a system of college admissions that needs some sort of promise to keep its wheels turning, to keep people buying in.

Test-optional was supposed to make the admissions decisions fairer, to get us closer to this phantom measure of merit. Time will tell if its contribution has been, in the grand scheme of things tested and untested, small or even smaller.