It’s still meritocratic in the sense of picking the people most capable of performing well in a higher academic setting.

It’s unfair. But nonetheless true that students who were better able to prepare due to superior resources are nonetheless better prepared.

So wouldn't it then be fairest to punish kids with high income or high wealth parents? Say set median household income. If parents make double this the score is automatically halved. If they make half it is doubled. Same on gross wealth. More wealth there is bigger the cut.

This would mean that says Musk's kids would need to get sufficiently higher scores than children of someone with no wealth.

> If these are outliers it isn't really meritocratic.

Merit is about demonstrated ability, not how much effort, time, or money was put into getting the ability.

As long as you convert money into ability and ability into results, that's merit. Nepotism is when you convert money directly into results, buying a score.

Tutoring can provide some advantage to the richer, but at least in my anecdotal experience I have never seen the advantage provided by tutors being able to match what really motivated poorer students could achieve by self study, at least not in the countries where in the past there was good access to public libraries, or today there may exist cheap Internet access.

In the US at least most schools take into account both test scores and social economic factors.

That it tends to become a caste system with extra steps (which steps provide a defense of the system as “fair”) is one of the chief criticisms of meritocracy (and criticism of the idea is where we got the term itself)

To achieve that you need to implement some kind of Harrison Bergeron system.

> a truly meritocratic system

only if you twist what you mean by meritocracy to mean equality.

Why don't you apply that exact same argument but to sports and athletics? People born with superior genes do perform better (ala, tall people in basketball).

Merit doesn't mean everyone starts at the same spot. Merit means your outcome is determined by how good you are at it - no matter how you get to become that good.