Meritocracy is a state where grade is being considered as the only criterion for students, regardless of virtue,competitions and overall abilities.

Meritocracy is a state you put all your efforts into running after the merits, which might cause the loss of virtue. If you throw away meritocracy, you can put emphasis on both merits and overall capacity.

We are NOT attacking merit itself. We still value effort and ability. What we oppose is meritocracy as a dominant system: the rule that says opportunities must be allocated only by measurable merit. The problem is not "valuing merit". The harm comes when meritocracy forces everyone to chase quantifiable markers like GPA, because those are the easiest metrics to judge. Even if merit theoretically includes all-round ability, in university practice, it collapses into grades. And we do not need to build a perfect replacement overnight. We just need to dismantle the monopoly of merit-based ranking and adopt plural evaluation. We can consider portfolios, interviews and practical experience alongside grades. The status quo’s harms are real and urgent; uncertainty in reform is not enough to preserve a harmful system.

This is a false dilemma. We do not discard merit; we merely end its monopoly. Our plural evaluation still considers ability, with safeguards like blind assessment to reduce favoritism toward loud or well-connected people. You only present two extremes: full meritocracy or raw favoritism, ignoring the middle path. The existing harms of meritocracy are real and ongoing, while your feared risk can be managed by institutional design.

No system is perfectly fair, and grades themselves are not bias-free either. Grades reward test-taking skills, and students with richer family resources can get tutoring to boost their GPA. Portfolios and interviews do not abandon merit; they just evaluate merit in different forms. Blind review, multiple independent judges and clear scoring rubrics can reduce subjective bias. You keep assuming we remove merit standards entirely, but we only remove GPA’s monopoly. We compare harms: the damage of meritocracy — ruthless GPA involution, distorted learning and squeezed virtue — already exists widely on campus. The bias risk of portfolios is manageable. We choose the lesser harm.

You are right that top universities already use non-grade factors, but this supports our side! It proves grades alone cannot capture real merit. Yes, merit becomes less numerically crisp, but fuzzier does not equal less fair. A simple number may look clear, yet it narrows merit down only to exam skills. That kind of sharp clarity comes at the cost of ignoring creativity, character and practical virtue. Merit itself is naturally diverse; it was never meant to fit into one single score. The problem of current meritocracy is forcing complex human ability into a narrow GPA metric. We accept some mild ambiguity in exchange for a fuller, less distorted picture of students.

his final worry relies on intuition, not proven harm. We agree no system is perfect, but GPA is not free from privilege either. Wealthier students get tutoring and resources to boost grades, so the current meritocracy also rewards connections and advantages. We are not removing all rules. We only end GPA’s monopoly while keeping safeguards like blind review and multi-judge panels to limit bias. The harms of campus meritocracy are real and ongoing: it forces students to chase scores, squeezes virtue and creates destructive involution. Your concern about fuzzy evaluation is only speculative risk. When we compare harms, opposing meritocracy and adopting plural evaluation is the better choice.