Meritocracy is the worst form of admissions except for all the other ones

I’m now going to say something explicitly that I hinted at in June: I don’t think a student deserves to make MOP more because they had a higher score than another student.

I think it’s easy to get this impression because the selection for MOP is done by score cutoffs. So it sure looks that way.

But I don’t think MOP admissions (or contests in general) are meant to be a form of judgment. My primary agenda is to run a summer program that is good for its participants, and we get funding for N of them. For that, it’s not important which N students make it, as long as they are enthusiastic and adequately prepared. (Admittedly, for a camp like MOP, “adequately prepared” is a tall order). If anything, what I would hope to select for is the people who would get the most out of attending. This is correlated with, but not exactly the same as, score.

Two corollaries:

• I support the requirement for full attendance at MOP. I know, it sucks for those star students who qualify for two conflicting and then have to choose. You have my apologies (and congratulations). But if you only come for 2 of 3 weeks, you took away a spot from someone who would have attended the whole time.
• I am grateful to the European Girl’s MO for giving MOP an opportunity to balance the gender ratio somewhat; empirically, it seems to improve the camp atmosphere if the gender ratio is not 79:1.

Anyways, given my mixed feelings on meritocracy, I sometimes wonder whether MOP should do what every other summer camp does and have an application, or even a lottery. I think the answer is no, but I’m not sure. Some reasons I can think of behind using score only:

1. MOP does have a (secondary) goal of IMO training, and as a result the program is almost insane in difficulty. For this reason you really do need students with significant existing background and ability. I think very few summer camps should explicitly have this level of achievement as a goal, even secondarily. But I think there should be at least one such camp, and it seems to be MOP.
2. Selection by score is transparent and fair. There is little risk of favoritism, nepotism, etc. This matters a lot to me because, basically no matter how much I try to convince them otherwise, people will take any admissions decision as some sort of judgment, so better make it impersonal. (More cynically, I honestly think if MOP switched to a less transparent admissions process, we would be dealing with lawsuits within 15 years.)
3. For better or worse, qualifying for MOP ends up being sort of a reward, so I want to set the incentives right and put the goalpost at “do maximally well on USAMO”. I think we design the USAMO well enough that preparation teaches you valuable lessons (math and otherwise). For an example of how not to set the goalpost, take most college admissions processes.

Honestly, the core issue might really be cultural, rather than an admissions problem. I wish there was a way we could do the MOP selection as we do now without also implicitly sending the (unintentional and undesirable) message that we value students based on how highly they scored.