Class Competition

After reading Sarah’s blog post “A Counter Example to the N-effect”, I began thinking about how school is really just another form of a game. Students compete with themselves, classmates, friends, siblings, and many other people to be able to get the best grades. The goal of getting good grades can be short or long term. Short term some goals may be to be on the honor role, to feel like your hard work paid off or to prove to someone else your intelligence. More long-term goals related to getting good grades include: getting into college, getting into graduate school or getting the job offer you want.

My competitive drive in school to receive good grades results from internal motivation to do the best I possibly can so that I have enabled myself to have the best possible opportunity to get the job I want out of graduate school. In terms of school work, I am hard on myself to reach my full potential, but I also feel competitive with other students when there are a limited number of top grades—such as when a class is graded on a curved scale. Particularly in big lectures, where I am not sure how a professor will grade a test, paper or other type of assignment, I feel the most competitive. I do not know the academic abilities of the hundreds of other students in that big class. However, in a smaller class or discussion I have a better idea of where I rank among the other students. Further, with a smaller class size, it is easier to build a relationship with the professor in the classroom situation. You are able to get a better sense of they will grade and the types of skills that are most important to them.

This idea about class size reminded me of a topic covered in my Psychology 250 (Developmental Psychology) class taught by Doctor Christopher Monk. In this class, we learned about a study on what makes a school effective. The results demonstrated that kids (from Kindergarten- 3^rd grade) in smaller class sizes had greater achievement in later grades, and were more likely to graduate. The reason behind this was determined to be that teachers of smaller classes spend the most amount of time giving individual attention to students, in turn providing the most effective teaching atmosphere for each student.

With this information, I came to the conclusion that the reason I felt the most competitive in larger classes was the information and way it is presented is less personally tailored to the ways in which I learn best. However, in a smaller class, whether or not the professor specifically tailors the information, it is easier to build a close-knit relationship with them and get the most out of learning. In a big lecture, the way a professor teaches may be more beneficial for other students than me, and so I feel more competitive to work harder to still receive the grade I want in the class.

However, Stephen Garcia’s idea of the N-effect claims that increasing the number of competitors decreases competition among competitors. In order to determine if other people also felt the opposite of the N-effect, I decided to conduct a survey that I posted to my Facebook and emailed to various college students. I found that I was indeed in the minority who felt this way about large classes.  The results were as follow:

The results paralleled Garcia’s findings with the N-effect. People felt most competitive with their friends—people who are very close in social-relation orientation—aside from feeling competitive to beat their personal best. They also felt most competitive in a small class, discussion or seminar. While these results were consisted with the N-effect, I hope to further explore why I feel so differently.