2. The highest score and thus most insightful and highest quality work, according to the professor's own evaluation, came not from collaboration but from one of the 3 lone wolves.
> Although by conventional test-taking rules, the students were cheating, they actually weren’t in this case.
2: The mob still contributed to the work of the lone wolves, it was absolutely still 'collaboration':
> Although the Wolves listened and contributed to discussions, they preferred their individual variants over the Mob’s joint answer.
Then there seems to be the rather odd point of "the students scored 20% higher than previous midterms", but it is unclear if his previous midterms were the same style - a single open-ended question.
We don't have the actual data but whatever the previous results were we can normalize them so the average score is 50%. We also don't know how many students there are, let's call it 100, so 97 pack students and 3 lone wolves.
We have 20% better results for the pack which received a uniform score. Let's say that's the 70th percentile. (This is a simplification we'll have to make do with until the author publishes the actual score data.)
One lone wolf scored at that 70th point, one below, one above.
The 70th percentile represents the best work that the pack of 97 could agree on. Out of the lone wolves, 2/3 of them did as well as this or better.
It is not hard to imagine that there was better potential work than 70th percentile among at least some of the 97 individuals in the pack than what was chosen through committee, work that will never be manifest because a committee is always a compromise.
It is also not hard to imagine how it is that the average went up given that the half of student population who previously scored in the 0 to 50th percentile are suddenly cast into the 70th percentile simply by choosing to join the pack, even though their contribution, insight and understanding remains exactly the same as before.
It is not hard to imagine a scenario where the failing students who have learned nothing and acquired no advancement in their understanding and yet who just scored 70% instead of 0-50% still have no insight. It is not hard to imagine that the really excellent possible work was suppressed by the groupthink of the crowd. Yet the "average" score is now 20% higher.
We don't even have to consider that this single question essay exam was almost certainly graded in a completely subjective manner and thus the percentages don't mean anything objective at all.
Edit: This is far more adversarial than I intended, and realize it's not a direct response to my parent post (which I thought was saying that this test shouldn't really affect the curve at all, as everyone scored the same, besides the wolves). That being said, I'm always happy to rant against using a strict curve for grading.
My Physics 101 course was taught by a boy-genius that had never taught at university level before. He was very smart and brilliant researcher I will grant but was a lousy teacher. He was very principled and a no curve policy in the syllabus and the first test given had an average score of around 30 out of 100 or so and all but 3 failed (I was #3 and had the equivalent of a D-). The test had no material that was covered in lecture or homework but was derivable from either the textbook or related concepts that the lecture covered indirectly.
He had no intention of changing his stance on that test and we had probably 15% of the class dropout but a week or so after he reversed that and skewed it so the average was a D and lowered its overall weight to final grade. Speculation was he was forced as it was very likely he would have failed 70+% of the class otherwise. It was very instructive to us and I think was a very good lesson as I took things much more seriously from then on and so did most of the class. So I thought that curve was not so bad but will tend to agree a strict curve is a bad thing especially if its not due to an unusual event like this.
You are missing the point here. The process of generating ideas from 27 brains, then using 27 brains to filter them down to a manageable number, then dividing up chores for reference-gathering, writing up, and copying is a far more productive process than 27 people trying to do this separately - they answered a much more open and advanced question, and the ones at the back will have understood much more, than if they had all just sat an exam.
They got better grades because groups of humans outperform individual humans by a huge margin, and that is the lesson of game theory. This exam was an elegant way to demonstrate that.
It wouldn't be the first time that a great idea is shot down because it's too far from everyone's comfort zone. But I'm just guessing.
One need to keep in mind, that "cheating" in school means nothing else than stepping outside arbitrary rule system that is, most of the time, totally opposed to what a honest, rational person would do in real life. Not that it's all bad; education is a training framework.