People are trash

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

What "the western world" is incapable of doing will be taken care of by the "spirit of competition". Caveat is that it requires inherent friendliness and empathy in people. Once that's gone, no amount of laws are going to stop competition from turning to frustration and bloody competition with revenge - and we're witnessing that right turning point now. (to ward off potential misunderstandings: this has no reference to me, this is a philosophical observation about society as a whole)

[Ishtvan]

I dunno, in all my science classes, every member of a group got the same grade on a project and it was up to the group to police themselves, with face-to-face mediation by the prof if there were big problems, but none of this backstabbing crap. Fear of confrontation leads to crappy management. I've known of advisors who couldn't tell their own students that their project got cut, so they asked one of their other students to tell them.

[jdude]

Yeah, "earned value management." "Bob earned less value than I did!"

 

lol. As contrived and ignorant I may sound saying this, it is true. In a group of 5, [at least in my university and college courses] there is always, ALWAYS at least one person who slacks off more-so than the rest. So it has never been difficult for me to distribute the grades. People always have excuses like "I had no internet" but it comes down to an "oh well" type of stance which must be taken.

[OrbWeaver]

lol. As contrived and ignorant I may sound saying this, it is true. In a group of 5, [at least in my university and college courses] there is always, ALWAYS at least one person who slacks off more-so than the rest.

 

There will always be somebody who achieves less than the rest, since people are not robots and do not always do exactly the same thing to exactly the same level of proficiency. This does not mean that they are "slacking off", and punishing them for "slacking off" just because they did not do as well as the others (even though they may have done their best and achieved a lot in objective terms) is ridiculous.

 

Such systems are based on the idea that forcing people to compete like starving rats causes the overall level of quality to improve. I dunno, maybe it works, but it certainly doesn't inspire me.

[oDDity]

No, but I'm all for slagging people off even if they try their hardest, but just aren't good enough. That's even worse. They shouldn't even be in education, they should be cleaning toilets or something, instead of wasting everyone's time.

That's life. Tough.

If you're born ugly, you can't be a supermodel. Tough.

If you're born stupid, you can't be a physics professor. Tough.

[OrbWeaver]

That's fine, as long as there is an objective standard for what "good enough" is. If you try your hardest, and don't meet the standard then that is indeed tough luck. If you meet the standard but are still considered to have failed because the guy next to you went a bit further, then the system is broken (unless you are an Olympic athlete or something).

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

I believe regardless of what benefit the "rat" competitive spirit brings to a society, a better system, more inspirational and with a higher COP can be designed if we approach the design of such a system as an engineering problem with some bright minds versed in psychology, sociology, etc.

[Ishtvan]

You can easily look at individual performance during individual exams and homework assignments, or by explicitly dividing up certain parts of a group project. We're talking about group projects where an entire team is working together to accomplish a single goal. Trying to extract individual performance from a group project by asking group members to rate their peers just seems like a bad idea.

 

First, it doesn't reflect the real world all that well. Sure, there is ranking within a company, but suppose you are on a team of 5 consultants from Firm A, assigned to develop a solution for Client X. You don't deliver by the deadline because 1 team member slacked off. Guess what, Client X doesn't care that the rest of the team members believed they worked harder than the 5th member, they just know your firm failed to deliver and will not do business with you again. You can then play the blame game to your heart's content internally, but to the potential clients on the outside, you all look like idiots.

 

Second, members can collude against eachother for reasons that have nothing to do with how much work was actually done. In fact, if it's a class where grades are based on a combination of individual and group tasks, there's actually incentive for mediocre students to give a bad group performance rating to a student in their group who they believe is doing very well in individual tasks, in order to advance themselves in the overall ranking.

[jdude]

It is true that the outside world application, directly from this exercise doesn't appear to be valuable at all. Rarely will you see a scenario which is similar to this exercise. It is really more of an exercise in conflict confrontation. People have to force themselves to tell other people what they think they could do better, why they think they deserve a certain grade ect ect. The marks you are given aren't based on a secret ballot your team does, rather everyone has to agree in person to the marks given which leaves room for debate amongst the students. If a student is too afraid to get in the debate because he is worried about hurting someone's feelings or being hurt, that student obviously isn't going to be good in the business world and his grade will accurately reflect it.

[Ishtvan]

@Jdude: That sounds like a good excercise if it's done in a public critique session and debate. What OTHB was describing sounded like they did it anonymously and he only found out by chance because the prof. told him or something.

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

that's correct, ishtvan. usually the default is equal sharing.