Once again you've misinterpreted my plain words.
Baseline competence is exactly what it sounds like - the baseline competence you need to succeed in the field. That's where the bar should be placed. It involves zero comparison to anyone else, it is evaluating you based on your performance compared to the objective needs of the profession, not compared to other students.
Supposed "meritocracy" instead ranks students against each other (as opposed to against an objective standard) based on a set of scores, many of which have little relevance to the actual field (for example, anyone with a 650 score on the SAT Verbal has just as much chance of becoming a good doctor as someone with an 800 score on the SAT Verbal, the gap at that level is virtually meaningless to doctoring skill). Instead of being compared to the actual needs of the profession, you're being compared to other students, and thousands of students who are perfectly capable of succeeding in the profession are instead "weeded out" as a high school junior or as a college freshman or when the take the MCAT merely because they didn't do as well as other students on some arbitrary test, even if they are more than capable and might have been admitted in a different year with a weaker class.
There's a world of difference between a baseline competence model and a "meritocracy" model, and moving towards competence rather than false "meritocracy" (as some elite schools have already started to do) would have a profound impact on education. Instead of focusing on improving standardized test scores with no real-world benefit and arbitrarily "weeding out" students via hurdles that have nothing to do with the profession, both the high school and college experiences could revolve around helping students learn and become better at the things they actually want to do with their lives. Instead of the college experience being framed as some sort of rat race where your primary goal is to outpreform the people around you via whatever grading structure the profession has chosen to throw into the syllabus that year, the college experience could be built around improving your own ability level, actually learning shyt that matters and becoming competent at skills you need.
This is where the Ipsative Assessment movement comes in. This is where the anti-SAT movement comes in. Both have some elite backers among professionals in the field and are being incorporated more and more into education. But they also have powerful enemies. And the vast majority of the opposition is formed because either A) people are afraid of change and tend to default to whatever system they themselves came from, or B) they're defenders of the elite and want to protect the gateways that keep the advantage in the hands of the elite.
None of this is about making school "easy". None of this is about removing rigor or problem-solving or critical thinking from the classroom. It's all about using actual meaningful standards to achieve those objectives, rather than just ranking students against each other for the sole purpose of ensuring that a certain # succeed and a certain # fail based primarily on how much advantage they had leading up to that moment.
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