I believe that regulated competition is good and necessary for the economy. It generates wealth and promotes progress. Similarly, competition in sports enhances skills and makes better athletes. By extension, competition in the classroom would generate knowledge and promote learning. Now, if the College wished to promote the pursuit of knowledge alongside moral and spiritual growth, surely it would prefer to do so in the most effective way possible. I hold that a competitive environment is best suited towards such an endeavor. Before you mark me crazy or, worse yet, cast me away to Harvard, please hear me out!
The problem with competition is that our mostly liberal community attaches negative connotations to the very word "competition," equating it, in the good spirit of neo-Marxism, with exploitation, alienation, and a generally shabby way of doing things. The burden therefore lies with the writer to prove that competition in a given arena, in this case, learning, would generate desirable results. Let us begin. I will approach by arguing for two claims. First, moderated competition does not harm student relations because cooperation is possible within the competitive arena. Second, competition drives students to learn better.
Competition requires units motivated to acquire a limited resource, such as good grades. The size of these units is irrelevant, as long as competition is possible between them. Thus, a small group of students can collaborate by studying or learning and improving together, while competing against other groups in a given class. My high school social studies teacher often divided us into groups and had us reenact historical debates between Lincoln and Douglas, Federalists and Anti-Federalists and others. Competing to win the debate, we cooperated to learn our arguments and support our position.
Also, competition engages students to strive for the top, improving their study skills, learning, and understanding of the material. When various study skills, such as methods of memorization and recall techniques, are pitted against each other in a drive towards better performance (as measured by the grading system), the best of the skills will survive, and the less good will be improved on.
Decide for yourself: how will material be best absorbed: by assigning readings and problem sets only to say that first, they won't be graded and second, grades are the least important thing in college, anyway? Or will students learn better if you assign graded homework and encourage high performance while using grades to benchmark that performance?
The most immediate argument against my position is that grade competition makes students care more about grades than about the material being taught. I find that argument faulty. If grades are tied closely to the acquisition of material taught, then grades will reflect one's understanding of the material, by definition.
Then there's the Harvard argument. The common, and mostly true, perception is that intense grade competition at Harvard alienates the students, makes them stuck-up and pretentious, while the focus on grades hinders true learning. Now, I believe undergraduate Harvard to be a generally unsuccessful and boring four-year investment, but I think competition's contribution to Harvard's faults is over-exaggerated. The students are alienated because of a lack of social outlets to foster interaction. Grades do not create pretentiousness; we all know the "Harvard type," and that type exists and comes to Harvard; it is not manufactured within its ivy walls. I truly believe that Dartmouth students are above such pretentiousness and thus not influenced negatively by competition.
Harvard, indeed, is a radical example from which moderation can be learned. If competition is both moderate and moderated, then it can achieve maximum efficiency in generating knowledge promoting learning.
Some ideas for improving competition are stricter grading, such as bell curve grading, where really good grades are limited and thus competitive. Also effective could be increasing the intrinsic value of top grades by various methods, such as publicly congratulating the top, say, three scorers in a given test.
Are these ideas terrible? Mostly, yes. But these are just some of a plethora of means to improve competition. Building such a system is better than one which assumes all students to be knowledge-hungry and internally motivated.
