The Reasonable Person Standard

Inspired by yesterday's World Cup 2010 draw, I find myself considering the heavily debated 'Group of Death.' For those of you who don't know, teams are randomly broken in to 8 groups of 4 teams. Almost without variance, one of these groups contains 3 or 4 highly touted teams and presents a particular challenge for teams to advance. Only the top two teams from each group move onto the knock-out phase of the competition, so many people feel that the draw is the first major step for prospective Cup winners.

In academics, especially upper level university courses, students often select the courses that they will take. With the understanding that grades are one of the primary factors considered by potential future employers, many students regularly consider the difficulty of potential courses before submitting their 'final answer.' While many students have used online resources to gauge the relative difficulty of particular classes and subject matter, oftentimes the impact of a curve is overlooked. The idea of 'the curve' is familiar to most students to the degree that it increases the grades of students who do poorly, especially where an entire class had difficulty with a particular assignment or course. The customary curve evenly distributes student's grades around the B+ range, while traditional grade-point scales continue to assert that the C range reflects average performance or mastery of the material. It is clear that the traditional curve usually gives the false impression of adequate or basic mastery of subject matter, what happens when the class does particularly well?

Many students argue that the curve is only designed to help students, not assist professors in evaluating the relative understanding of course participants. While this may be the desire of students around the world, the fact is the curve was developed to normalize grades into a way which allowed for consistent and equivocal comparison between students, classes, and even generations. Although many students would advocate a capricious application of the curve to situations only where their grades would be positively impacted, equitable practice standards would require universities and other institutions of academic advancement to apply the normalizing distribution regardless of the potential positive or negative impact to a particular group of students. Under the right conditions, or from one point of view the wrong conditions, the curve could result in some students exceptional performance (>85% accuracy) as average, or C level. To be clear, this would occur where the class average was above that of the traditional C. Where many students achieve perfect or near perfect scores, students who performed in the traditional C range could be assessed below average performance. In reality, the B curve fights this by generally raising the grades of students outside of the top 20% of a given class.

Having recently embarked on the study of law, I now find myself particularly aware of the potential impact of 'the curve' and wondering if I have found myself among the academic equivalent of FIFA's 'Group of Death'. Not having chosen any of our professors, many of colleagues have heard and perpetuated rumors about which professors from which sections are particularly easy. While some would argue that the professors are my metaphorical 'opponents' are the professors. As noted earlier, many students place heavy emphasis on which professors are difficult. However, I would like to offer an alternative opinion: Other students, not the professors, are the adversaries because of 'the curve.' As with the World Cup, I was assigned (presumably randomly) to an academic section, with which I share all of my classes. Sharing classes with the same 50 or so students means that my relative success is being measured against the same group in 5 classes, after which my grades will compared to students in other sections. As indicated by a mid semester exam, which more closely resembles a quiz both in content and relative weight, the key to success is not understanding or applying material, but rather who can better figure out how to regurgitate what the professor is looking for.

At this point, months before the World Cup, it seems easy to pick the 'Group of Death.' At this moment, one group holds three teams statistically forecast to finish in the top 10. While in another group, there seems to be a chasm of skill and ability between the top two teams and those that follow. When a new semester begins, students rarely look around and assess the relative abilities of their neighbors; as noted earlier, the focus remains on the professor. In many cases, students spend the early moments of class asking what others have heard about the decorated academic they have chosen to follow over the coming weeks. While understanding and ultimately surpassing the requirements and expectations of a professor is essential, it is not the key to success and eventually good grades. In soccer pundits regularly discuss the mental demand of the World Cup, the technical challenges teams face as the newest trends in formation and play style filter through each of the 32 nations featured in the supreme tournament, and the impact 'star' players will have in their various games. The 'how' to winning becomes a macro-, rather than a micro-, consideration. While this approach may prove stimulating for discussion and debate leading up to the tournament, the truth is that each individual match result stands as the true evaluation of a team's success.

While Team A may play well in a loss to Team B, Team A still holds 0 points from the match. The relative success of a team against the other members of their group is all that matters. There is no 'wild card' as we see in many American sports. There is no room for good play that doesn't bring home points. Most of all, the successes of 4 years ago have nothing to do with the matches of today. Back in our classrooms, our success is much the same. Where a true C curve is applied, all that matters is that you beat more than half of the class. For those who truly hope to excel, you have to beat ninety percent or more of your classmates. In an environment where the individuals relative performance is the true measuring stick, getting an A on a test isn't enough anymore, that A has to be higher than other A's. In that thought I find myself wondering if I have fallen into the proverbial 'Group of Death.' In some ways this thought is saddening: knowing that one's own success depends on the relative shortfalls of friends, study partners, and peers.

While some would theorize this creates a need to undermine others by isolating oneself and not sharing the treasures of knowledge learned throughout a semester, traditional human charity seems to ask us to do the opposite. In a world where relative success determines an outcome, the logical action would be to disseminate misinformation and actively thwart the efforts of your competitors. Indeed, in sports that is just the goal. Teams play defense to make it harder, but in academia, we share. We talk. We theorize and hypothesize together. We edit papers. We coexist. In this way we are not actually measuring relative ability to academically adapt and perform, but we seem to measure collective and group understanding. What Student 1 writes is going to be similar to Student 2, 3, and 4, all of whom studied together. The ironic part of this reality is that while the content of the essays will be nearly verbatim the same on the catch phrases and key words, the students will be awarded a slight variance in grade, probably for the sole purpose of creating some semblance of a distribution. In this case what do we measure? Why do we measure it? Even though we undermine the foundation of the curve by eliminating direct competition and fabricating an illusory comparison which becomes largely based on the precise moment in time when the professor reaches a particular student's paper, we continue to play the game. Collusion and cooperative study may help some, but such actions ultimately cloud the standard by which we are judged. If 1 teaches a concept to 2, and 2 helps 3 understand, can we really say that 3 and 1 are academic equals when they both demonstrate an ability to identify the concept through a multiple choice question?

It seems to me that our academic success is no longer based on relative ability to understand and apply. With a fog of ambiguity clouding the comparable abilities of my peers, I still wonder with what are they playing? How to I stack up? Have I fallen in with a group of the academic elite or not? To this end it is impossible to determine if this is the 'Group of Death,' or if such a group even exists.

Without the game we cannot know who wins.