Bostonian, I agree that you and I clearly have different perspectives here. My DH is highly competitive-- like you. So I respect that your perspective is valid.
But my experiences as a teacher would indicate that practices which
support competitiveness rather than cooperative learning environments-- on balance, I mean-- leave a greater percentage of students WORSE off than before.
Another reason to support change to a more cooperative model is that students don't wind up viewing
future colleagues as "the enemy" when they need to learn how to work in teams. This is
really crucial in engineering and science disciplines, and it used to be an area where future employer stakeholders and professional organizations were telling colleges that we were FAILING our students in a pretty much EPIC fashion by setting them up to "compete" with one another rather than viewing learning as a potentially collaborative experience without winners and losers. While
someone has to lose a football game, that is NOT the case in a biology lab. Nobody "has" to get an F in order for someone else to get an A-- unless we're talking about pure Gaussian grading, which has also fallen out of favor for the same reason-- its arbitrary nature and artificiality.
This isn't about student "feelings" so much as a pragmatic view that suggests that making learning a situation where the 'finish line' is not arbitrary, but has a well-defined set of expectations, makes it fine for a lot MORE students to cross that line with success. Some won't, of course. I'm no suggesting that "we're all winners here" is a good thing, either. I feel that student grades SHOULD reflect to what degree an individual has demonstrated mastery of the subject. But that's
all that they should do.
Again, I was witness to that sea change. It's been a very hard sell in the physical sciences, and most of the old guard was never able to accept the truth of it-- in spite of evidence that it was true and that changing it didn't lead to "dumbing down" anything or to making students "soft."
It
has led to better retention of women and minorities in those disciplines, however.
