I read merit points as what you want and attendance points as what it costs to get those merit points. So if you needed 300 merit points to complete your project, then you could take 92 Columbia attendance units or 4 University of Chicago attendance units. In a lot of cases, it seems to take a lot of warm bodies.
The big goal of this MLH season was to encourage new hackers to join the existing community. Specifically, attendance points encourage hackers to travel to other universities / hackathons that they might not normally go to and to finish a hack (which is super important). It also incentivizes hackers to find other people at their schools that they can travel and work with.
