Meritocracy, which is a system Hong Kong is adapting in the academic field, believes that ones’ success is solely based on a person’s talent, effort and merit. This system is supposed to offer a fair setting for students to excel in the academic realm, with equal starting points regardless of their family’s background, social status and wealth. With its highly transparent and unbiased system, the Hong Kong educational system seems to be unassailable. Yet, such a description can only exist in the utopian world. On the contrary, the real-life incidents pose a dichotomy on the promises of the meritocracy system, failing to reward hard work and talents.
This dichotomy is not vividly exposed in classroom superiority, but in the realm of high-stakes, award-winning competition. The recent Medisafe controversy serves as a potent case study. Form 4 student, Clarisse Poon was once celebrated as the technology prodigy after her innovation in an AI-powered platform Medisafe. Her dedication to this project was well-recognised, garnering awards in the Hong Kong ICT Awards (2024) and the International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva (2025), positioning herself in the public eye as the rising technological star in the new generation. Conversely, her success was later overshadowed by the allegation that the entire project was built and constructed by an US-based company. The issue here is not merely receiving external assistance for academic achievement, but the nature of the assistance — the purchase of winning a prize credential.
When a prize-winning entry can be fully manipulated and commodified by a student with a privileged background, the core of meritocracy — the fundamental promise of ensuring fairness in academic competition — is fully compromised. This incident is a prime example of how wealth subverts the ‘equal starting points’ into transactional assets, when merits are easily attainable by wealth, regardless of one’s ability or genuine effort. Intellectual capacity, which covers individuals’ talent, effort and integrity is shifted to financial capacity, solely depending on the money used to hire developers. In such cases, cheaters invalidated the efforts of other competitors and shattered the underlying meritocracy system to plutocracy — a society governed by the wealthy, while being veiled in merits and successes. According to the Fair Equality of Opportunity, all students should have access to the basic educational resources and support necessary to develop merit. On the contrary, in the realistic world, wealthier students already start with superior preparation, making the competitiveness among students unbalanced. Crucially, the Medisafe incident epitomises the ultimate violation of the principle of Fair Equality of Opportunity. The allegation that Clarisse Poon’s family utilised a significant amount of financial capital to produce an outstanding, award-winning project, in which the outcome is purchased, not earned. Competitions, with the aim of pulling diverse backgrounds of students closer, ironically, are now reinforcing deep-seated academic stratification.
Zooming out from the Medisafe incident, the erosion of equal starting point is further jeopardised by the phenomenon of shadow education and high-prerequisite schools. Top-notch institutions, like the Hong Kong International School operate as a filter, acceptance is often predicated on the families’ wealth and their social background. Offering unparalleled advantages with smaller class sizes and exclusive learning resources. Learning sessions are highly optimised, with strategic interventions designed to score maximum points, which are unavailable to the majority. On the contrary, students from lower income families can merely rely on the standard school curriculum, failing to achieve the same level of result as the wealthier student. This systematic disparity means that academic results increasingly reflect a student’s purchased preparation rather than their intrinsic merit or dedicated effort. To add fuel to the fire, the multi-billion dollar shadow education industry widens the academic disparity based on financial capacity, giving the wealthy significant pre-paid lead even when the race has not even started. This is a vicious cycle, where academic success is secured by financial capacity, putting forward promising future employment opportunities and intergenerational transmission of wealth, continuing to inherit and accumulate their economic power.
How can we safeguard merit when wealth can easily buy preparation and the final credentials? Verification structure is in paucity among the meritocracy system in Hong Kong, there is no tool to guard a competition’s fairness. Hong Kong, with intense competition in university spots, relies heavily on objective evaluation of students’ competition and public examinations. In the Medisafe incident, the judging panels of the Hong Kong ICT award depend on traditional verification mechanisms that are incapable of auditing high-tech academic projects nowadays. It is irrational to think a Form Four student is capable to independently code and optimise such innovative AI application, when the level of technological sophistication required is typically the domain of specialised professional engineering teams. Expecting a panel without prior technical expertise to determine true authorship is unrealistic. The system is therefore ill-equipped to confront the modern challenge of commodified intellectual labor. When judging panels focus merely on the originality of the concept, they neglect the crucial verification of execution authorship. By failing to conclusively determine the outsourced nature of work, the verification structure inadvertently validates credentials that are purchased. This failure converts fairness into an instrument to grant legitimacy, amplify societal stratification achievements, catering to the wealthy.
The Medisafe academic controversy is a mirror for us to reflect on Hong Kong’s meritocracy system, which has now become the very mechanism that reinforces inequality, ironically. The ability of financial capacity to modify credentials, normalisation of shadow education and the loopholes of the verification mechanisms, create an environment where true academic achievement is obscured by transactional success. It is high time for us to review the loopholes in our education system and adapt a new set of judging mechanisms to meet the outpacing technological development. Setting an equal environment for students to compete, ending academic stratification.
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Lam Hiu Tung
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