I had a CS Professor who was convinced that he had cheaters in the class(1), so he decided we should all be graded on performance of our programs. This resulted in a lot of stress for a lot of students (C code only, most students taught only Pascal/Modula-2) and some seriously nasty things done in the programs. I rate it a big fail for what we were doing.

I can actually kind of see this for embedded / small device programming. Embedded systems that can't meet their performance goals are useless and buying faster hardware is very costly option.

(1) he also believed not one of us submitted a C program to print "Hello, World!" that worked. It was a 8AM class and I had just driven 120miles (home visiting) through a blizzard to make it to class when he announced this fact in a dramatic fashion. I required calming down.