Forcing the worst ideas of history on the next generation . . . for their own good
From 1961 to 1989, a wall famously encircled what was then known as West Berlin. West Germans called it the “Wall of Shame” (Mauer der Schande), a phrase coined by then-Mayor Willy Brandt. In the U.S., we called it simply “the Berlin Wall,” and though the term is neutral we all knew the wall was there to keep the residents of East Germany from escaping to the West—in other words, to keep them “in” by keeping them outside the circle. On the Communist side of the wall, it was called the “Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier” (Antifaschistischer Schutzwall), as if it kept capitalist westerners out. But no one was fooled, even on the Communist side, for one simple reason: people didn’t get shot breaking into East Berlin; they got shot trying to break out.

Economists call that a “revealed preference,” a preference we test for by observing behavior rather than by asking opinions. Revealed preferences can be very instructive, even to the people who are revealing them. So for the last five years or so I’ve been giving students in my modern world history classes a taste of socialism in practice. In that class, as in all my others, we begin each day with a “low-stakes quiz” (or “LSQ”) on the previous night’s reading. The quiz consists of only five questions, designed to be “so easy that a trained monkey would answer them all correctly, provided that monkey had done the assigned reading.” Plus, I grade them out of four, so the boys have five chances to make four points. But at the beginning of our unit on socialism, I announce that these will be “socialist LSQs,” meaning that I will calculate the class average for each quiz and then give each student the average score.
The First Try – Unbelievable
The first time I tried this was in the fall of 2020, the year our school reopened from the COVID quarantine while most other high schools were closed. The course was mandatory for all juniors that year, and when I announced the socialist LSQs they simply didn’t believe me. In each of the four sections, we had an interesting discussion about why it was so hard to believe. Why not give everyone the same score? The top students understood correctly that their grade was likely to be lower, but their loss was offset by someone’s gain in the bottom half of the class. If it all evens out, is there anything objectionable about the policy? Isn’t it permissible to design a grading policy that emphasizes the common struggles of all students over the exceptional talents of a few?
Or to put it another way, why is it important to assess individual performance rather than the performance of the group? They all experienced the oppression of being graded all the time; wouldn’t it be nice to be relieved from that? Interestingly, they didn’t think so. They wanted their effort to matter. Perhaps more fundamentally, they knew both that the effort would be good for them and that they needed the pressure of external feedback in order to put forth the effort.
The students assured me they understood the lesson I was teaching, and asked me to end the ruse and go back to individual scoring. But I insisted it was no ruse, and I promised them very solemnly that I would actually give them the average score. They eventually believed me. How could I tell? Because their quiz scores started to go down. Although many continued to read because they wanted to, more and more stopped reading because, well, they didn’t want to. The disappearance of the extrinsic incentive for reading led very predictably to less reading, and that showed in the class averages for all four sections of the course.
Second Attempt Surprises
I decided to repeat the experiment in the fall of 2021, with mostly similar results. As in year one, the students objected strenuously when I announced the policy, and it took a solemn promise on my part to convince them I was not kidding. And again, they overwhelmingly expressed their preference for a world in which they were individually accountable for their diligence and individually rewarded for their performance.
Two things were different, however. First, the course was an elective that second year, so it was at least conceivable that everyone in the class would want to read, no matter how I was scoring the quizzes. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried about that; the scores trended downward as before.
But the second difference was that I knew all of the students better that year, because I had taught them all logic as freshmen. That made me more alert to individual changes in behavior; I therefore noticed it right away when some students who habitually skipped the reading in earlier units began to read every night and do quite well on the socialist LSQs. What explained this?
Possibly, these students saw the point I was trying to make—it was not too subtle, after all—and wanted to throw a wrench in the works; maybe if they tried very hard, they could make the socialist LSQ scores get better over time! Knowing the students in question, there may have been some of that.
But mostly, I think the students who tried harder in the socialist world were motivated by solidarity with their peers. These students, it seemed, were perfectly happy to sabotage their own prospects by skipping the reading, but they were unwilling to keep their friends from succeeding. Or more concretely: they didn’t mind a C personally, but they knew a C would be devastating for some of their high-GPA friends. We talked about this in class as well, and we imagined the kinds of social units where we might expect to see this reaction (strongly in families, less strongly in graduating classes, even less strongly among strangers). We speculated about what our experience might teach us about the feasibility of “democratic socialism” in ethnically homogeneous countries like some in Scandinavia; about whether diversity and socialism, both championed by the modern left, might not be fundamentally at odds.
The Most Recent Lessons
After similar results in 2022, I gave the socialist LSQs a year off in 2023. But they were back this year, and they prompted yet another change in behavior. Normally, with non-socialist LSQs, students who have not done the reading mill around before class with students who have done the reading, begging crumbs of understanding with which to face the impending quiz. We call this “the Knucklehead Summary™,” and although it is not illicit, it is generally done furtively. But as I approached the classroom on the first day of the socialist LSQs, I saw the boys huddled outside the door, having a conversation that was more of a class meeting. I use the word “huddled” advisedly, for the students resembled nothing so much as the huddle in a sandlot football game, with the quarterback drawing up a play in the dirt. But here, the quarterback was one of the stronger students, and instead of telling the boys to “go long” or “run a button-hook,” he was telling them about the Russo-Japanese War, or Bloody Sunday, or Rasputin’s influence on the Tsarina. And there was nothing furtive about it; it was in fact “open and notorious,” as lawyers say.
This souped-up version of the Knucklehead Summary became a daily occurrence in one of the two sections of the course, and the scores showed that it really worked. After another week or so, I started seeing written summaries of the assigned readings—produced by the student we might as well just call the Quarterback, first with the help of ChatGPT and then, after my remonstration, from scratch. He also promised candy bars to people who scored 4/4 on the quizzes, and quite a few candy bars changed hands. And although the scores still tanked in the first few quizzes after my announcement, this year they went on to recover pretty significantly from their steep decline—but only in the class that was benefitting from the Quarterback’s new and improved Knucklehead Summaries™.
The Incentives in Socialism
What should we make of this? Quite a bit, I think. Experience teaches that many students slack off when they are not personally accountable for the results of their efforts. But experience also teaches that the same incentive structure can affect people in very different ways, depending in large part on the background level of social cohesion. In earlier years, the socialist LSQs lowered overall performance but induced a few of the less industrious students to take their game up a notch. This year, the socialist LSQs induced one of the stronger students first to help the weaker students do this, and then eventually to overthrow the system itself by supplanting it with an entirely different incentive structure based on sugar rather than grades. (Food for thought!)
But the story doesn’t end there, because although the Quarterback’s class performed significantly better than the other section on daily quizzes, it also performed significantly worse on the overall unit test later. (I grade all tests blindly, so I could not have projected that disparity onto the two samples.) Why the contrast between short-term and long-term effects? I don’t have enough data to prove it, but my hypothesis is that the Quarterback’s efforts to avoid the downsides of socialist grading worked exactly as intended, and they were only intended for the short term. In the longer term, the effect was negative, because (I suspect) anything that improves a student’s chance of getting a good quiz score without doing the assigned reading makes that student less likely to do the assigned reading.

So let’s review: I adopted a grading policy that I expected to make my students do less work and get worse grades. They did; they hated the policy, and learned something about socialism’s effect on personal accountability. That’s a win in my book. But also, with time, students found a way of adapting to my bad policy to mitigate some of its most hated effects; the trouble was that the adaptations also had negative effects on long-term academic performance. That’s where I draw the line: it’s time to retire the socialist LSQs. Next year, we’ll go back to the old-fashioned approach built on individual effort and accountability.
But naturally, in the spirit of socialism, I maintain that the mixed results described here constitute an unqualified success, and that we in HIST 403 have been building, in solidarity, the glorious Classroom of the Future.