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The question is: how grade adjustments can be gamed by students? If well done, it can turn into a competitive exam, so that students will fight each other rathe
by fab13n 15y ago
The question is: how grade adjustments can be gamed by students? If well done, it can turn into a competitive exam, so that students will fight each other rather that syndicate to game the system. But then, you'll have a very nasty class dynamics, which will favor sociopaths.
That's what happens, for instance, with medical students in France: studies are free (or rather everyone pay for them all their lives through taxes), but by the end of 1st year there's the _numerus clausus_: the number N of MD to be trained is determined, a national exam is set up and the N best grades get to enter 2nd year. As a result, describing the relationship between 1st year students as nasty would be an understatement.
- DasIch 15y agoIf well done gamification may create a competitive environment but you don't really want that. You want people who solve problems, preferably in teams.
- jessriedel 15y agoThis doesn't really seem like rational self-interested behavior on the part of the students. There are thousands of doctors trained every year in a country as large as France. A student's choice to mean or nice to the tiny subset of his peers which he will have substantial interaction with is going to have a negligible effect on the average score. Therefore, it's very much in his interest to cooperate with his small group of local peers in order that the group can do better than the average. Since students do end up being nasty to each other, that tells us there's something very irrational going on. Thus, it might be more effective to try to manipulate that irrationality away than changing the fundamental structure of the tests.