This little story appeared in my inbox. It’s obviously meant to illustrate the perverse incentive structure created by redistribution, but one wonders why statists in the academic world don’t follow through on their convictions and use this grading system.
A professor said he had never failed a single student before but had, once, failed an entire class. The class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer. The professor then said ok, we will have an experiment in this class on socialism.
All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.
After the first test the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. But, as the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too, so they studied little.
The second test average was a D. No one was happy.
When the third test rolled around, the average was an F.
The scores never increased as bickering, blame, and name calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for anyone else.
To their great surprise, all failed. The professor told them that socialism would ultimately fail because the harder it is to succeed the greater the reward, but when a government takes all the reward away, no one will try so no one will succeed.
…In an attempt to address failure, the class votes to mandate that each and every student spend 8 hours at the library. So now students have lost their freedom to, and still only do 20min worth of work during the 8 hours they are forced to be present and appear to be studying at the library. With the mere 20min study equivalent the grade improves to a D-, life moves along and the class survives (if barely). This world of harmony is disrupted by other “greedy” schools who do not adopt the egalitarian approach and by virtue of comparison to their success spoil the egalitarian paradise. Enter a new popular national organization that seeks to eliminate schools deemed to be “performance heavens” and unfair competition…
I had this happen to me in high school, in a Civics class no less. The lesson wasn’t about the ills of Socialism, though it should have been. It was just an attempt to have the stronger students help the weaker ones. In my 4-5 person group, one of the less studious students was giddy when I was selected for his group. He instantly knew he was going to get a better grade when averaged with mine. Fortunately, our grades didn’t get averaged in the end, but initially that was the teacher’s intent. A friend and I went to both the principal and superintendent to argue against this new way of learning. During our discussion with the superintendent, we were told that in society you are only as good as your weakest link.
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[...] posted a video making this point earlier in the year, and I also posted a version of this joke back in 2010, but here’s another version that’s worth sharing because of the five lessons to be [...]
[...] posted a video making this point earlier in the year, and I also posted a version of this joke back in 2010, but here’s another version that’s worth sharing because of the five lessons to be learned at [...]