[DalekBaldwin]

High school, at least as far as it serves as a sorting mechanism for top students, follows a kind of Parkinson's law: the number of hoops to jump through increases until it reaches the natural limit of how little sleep the top students can handle.

There were rumblings that my high school, which had plenty of AP classes already, was about to introduce a combination AP/IB curriculum, which absolutely terrified us. I and my AP-taking classmates breathed a huge sigh of relief when it was announced that it would be delayed, and the students in the year below us would be the guinea pigs. They would have to run twice as fast just to stay in place.

[mountainofdeath]

Indeed. In my time, it wasn't uncommon to have 6 AP classes a semester along with at least one time-intensive extracurricular. Assuming each class is the equivalent of 3 credit hours, it's the equivalent of an above average number of classes in college (15 being the expected amount, 12 being the minimum to be a full-time student, and 18 considered intensive) while playing a competitive sport.

The best part: Even a decade ago, the above was considered neccesary but not sufficient for admission to a top school. Plenty of people with perfect to near-perfect college entrance exams, Intel International Science and Engineering Fair finalists, etc didn't make the cut. Of the few that did, the majority were the lower Ivy's (Dartmouth and Brown).

[wjnc]

There is a book called “Seven checkmarks” in Dutch that argues that succes in the Netherlands is strongly correlated to seven checkmarks to have: male, highly educated parents, white, certain type of elite high school, university educated and one more. Having all the marks, having generally underperformed academically and still coming out on top comparatively I feel there might be some truth in it. It would signal a quite stratified society with a “ruler class” inside a society that thinks of itself as classless for the last 60 years at least. (It’s pretty hard to reason about this being while being under scrutiny.)

Why post this? After reading your comment I thought wouldn’t want to live there or raise children there. But the second thought was, wait - that’s meritocracy in action. Imperfect meritocracy as you point out, but it might still be more equitable not than having seven checkmarks and generally faring worse than those born under a different star. My Rawlsian self thinks grit should be rewarded more than birth, even though testing for grit would probably massively increase burnout.

Thinking even further, I don’t think that societies with “high grit” (Korea, US) are generally considered to treat their children and general society very equitable. Still mentally debating if there is a very socialist argument growing inside of me. That book (read it three months ago) does make me think a lot. It was the first time something ‘near-woke’ made me think so hard. The book mentions the reflective point as well - might I only take it that seriously because it was written by someone from the same “class”? Foundational stuff.