It might if the flight instructor also controlled for what circumstances he hands out praise and scolding. If it's a Gaussian distribution of performance, and

It might if the flight instructor also controlled for what circumstances he hands out praise and scolding. If it's a Gaussian distribution of performance, and he praises above the 99th percentile of bad performance and scolds below the 99th percentile, that 80%-80% pattern might very well occur---but again, it'd be expected to occur, independent of the signal he's putting into the system (because the candidate's he's scolding are staggeringly unlikely to get worse, and the candidates he's praising staggeringly unlikely to get better).