Brené Brown

And so setting an arbitrary bar, a limit, a ceiling on how many can excel in a given class seems ridiculous to me.

And frankly, as a professor, I want as many of my students as possible to master the material.

And so the way that I've navigated this in my own courses for years is I give extremely hard exams.

And the mean on them is often a 65 or 70%.

But then I curve upward so that the student who does best is at 100.

And then everybody is adjusted from there.

And that creates a real distribution based on who has really learned the material of the class.

But it also creates an incentive for everybody to excel and also to help each other.

To me, the saddest thing about only 20% of students getting A's is everybody's going to look around thinking my classmates are now my competition.

We can't study together.

We can't learn from each other.

We're not going to collaborate anymore.

Why would you want to pit students against each other to learn when in real life learning is a collaborative activity?

Completely.

And you're solving one problem of giving out EZA's while creating a whole bunch of others.

Wow.

So you're forcing them to have the real conversation about who contributed what?

What a smart way to foster both self-awareness and other awareness.

And I think this should be done in work teams, not just in your class.

Yes.