College as High-Stakes Achievement Play
The first season of Ted Lasso introduces viewers to star striker Dani Rojas, who lives by this ethos: “football is life.” Dani embodies a bright-sided vision of what this ethos can mean. He is warmhearted, lively, and upbeat, and he doesn’t hold his star status above the other players. However, Dani also shows the potential darkness of this motto. During the show’s second season, he suffers a case of the “yips,” becoming unable to perform even basic football skills. If football is life, and he can no longer play at even a rudimentary (let alone star) level, what does that mean for Dani’s life?
Fortunately, he is able to see a highly regarded sports psychologist to realign his mind and body. But for most people who experience the physical and mental consequences of high-stakes games that bleed into their real lives, this is not an option. Which is why we should exercise caution about equating games with life itself. In fact, season four of the show briefly introduces us to Dani’s sister Maria, who tries out for the women’s team. When asked by a coach if she shares her brother’s motto, Maria responds, “No, dum dum! Life is so much more than football.” My core message for today’s post is this: Danny is a compelling character, but we should really listen to his sister.
In his book The Score, Philosospher C. Thi Nguyen explains that scoring systems determine the motivations of game players. How do we acquire points or keep from losing them? How do we make sure we have the most points at the end? These are the questions players must focus on to realize their goal—that is, to win. Now, formal education is not officially a game, but Nguyen argues persuasively that like many institutions in contemporary life, formal education has been extensively gamified; navigating these institutions often feels, for better or worse, like playing a game.
Nguyen is a big fan of real games, which expand people’s creativity and flexibility as they respond to the constraints imposed by games. But key here is that real games are freely chosen, and their impacts are bounded within the games themselves; when a game ends, people move on, win or lose. Gamified institutions, however, are unbounded; they lack clear beginning and endpoints, and their outcomes impact the actual lives of “players” in many ways, often harmfully. This potential for harm is especially true in formal education.
Grades represent education’s scoring system; to receive an A in a course is to “win.” Readers might object that wins and losses represent a binary, whereas most grading systems include five letter grades ranging from A to F (not to mention plusses and minuses). And while this is true, many contemporary students feel intense pressure to maintain very high, almost spotless GPAs, which converts grading into a zero-sum game. Many students feel they have “lost” if they receive any grade less than an A, even if they worked extremely hard. Nguyen refers to this kind of game as achievement play, where both the goal and the purpose are to win. In achievement play, the process matters only insofar as the outcome matters.
Nguyen sets achievement play against striving play, where winning is the goal but not the purpose. Striving players assume the guise of desiring to win, but what they really care about is the “experience of struggling to overcome obstacles” (32). Sometimes stiving players win and sometimes they lose, but if they embrace the creative decision-making and problem-solving that come from struggling to win, they will relish the experience regardless of the official outcome. With striving play, the outcome matters only insofar as the process matters.
Because of their differing orientations toward outcome and process, I find Nguyen’s framework of achievement play and striving play useful for the question I have been wrestling with in this series: what does it mean for students to earn an A in college courses?
Before exploring these connections, let’s recap my previous post, which explored two versions of the achievement equation, essentially a shorthand arithmetic for judging whether students have earned an A. In the idealized version of this equation, high effort plus high quality = an A. But in most college courses, instructors grade only the quality of student work, not their effort. Which means in practice, the achievement equation is simpler: high quality alone = an A. Obviously, in many cases, high quality is correlated with high effort, but high effort is rarely a requirement or a metric that instructors assess.
I situated these perspectives of achievement on the quality/effort matrix, a thought experiment I have been using to guide this series. This matrix depicts four permutations related to the quality of what students produce in a course (exams, papers, presentations, etc.) and the effort they put into these products:
The Quality/Effort Matrix
If we take the idealized achievement equation, where both effort and quality are high, students can only earn an A in Quadrant Two. But if we take my revised (and, to my mind, more accurate) equation, where high quality alone stands for achievement, students can earn an A in either Quadrant One or Quadrant Two.
In that post, I argued that no educator should be satisfied with Quadrant One, where students experience limited cognitive rigor; even as they are meeting course standards for quality, students probably aren’t learning very much. However, I tried to offer legitimate explanations for why students might end up in this quadrant. For example, students’ existing knowledge and ability may have transcended the course material, making it fairly easy to meet course standards. Ideally, as these students move up the curricular ladder and take more advanced and challenging courses, they will experience more cognitive rigor. In this optimistic reading, Quadrant One is potentially a rest area on the way to Quadrant Two.
And some students undoubtedly move from Quadrant One to Quadrant Two some of the time. But Nguyen’s concept of achievement play illustrates why this trajectory can be so difficult. That is, higher education’s gamified ethos of achievement play, combined with the high stakes many students attach to their grades, pushes students toward Quadrant One. Let’s unpack this claim.
Remember that with achievement play, the process matters only insofar as the outcome matters. There is nothing inherently wrong with this ethos. But it comes with a danger: players might decide that the process scarcely matters at all as long as they achieve their preferred outcome. And this danger intensifies as the perceived consequences of winning and losing intensify. Nguyen explains that some people “game the system,” which is to “exploit the gap between the signals a system uses to confer rewards and the genuine goods the system was built to promote” (284). Put another way, to game the system is to corrupt the process.
Nguyen discusses the gamification of science, where prestige and power are conferred to those who publish the most. “Scientists who pick the least rigorous methodology will tend to publish more papers,” whereas those “who use a more painstaking, rigorous methodology—get more accurate results, but that level of rigor forces them to work more slowly, and publish fewer papers” (283-4). Scientists are thus incentivized to leverage the gap between high-quantity publications and high-quality science. Not everyone chooses this path, of course, but when people feel their careers are on the line, the temptation can be overwhelming. We have seen this narrative play out in the social sciences, where a critical mass of scholars engaged in behaviors consistent with gaming the system and propagated a now infamous replication crisis.
Returning to higher education and what it means to earn an A, the dark side of gamification can be (literally) summed up with a more ominous achievement equation: the ethos of achievement play plus the perception of high stakes = the inevitable corruption of the learning process.
As I have argued consistently, higher education is structured around precarious meritocracy. This is my term for the perception many students have that navigating formal education feels like climbing a ladder. At the top is a financially secure career, and at the bottom is a state of permanent economic precarity. To succeed is to always be climbing up (passing many peers along the way). But if one should ever “fall” or be “pushed off” the ladder for any reason, one will be stuck at the bottom, eking out a living amid a frayed social safety net.
Precarious meritocracy establishes the material and affective basis for the high-stakes, zero-sum gamification of higher education. And insofar as the quality/effort matrix is concerned, Quadrant One is where the effects of gamification show up most clearly. Or, to mix numerical metaphors, Quadrant One is Ground Zero for corrupting the learning process.
Earlier in this series, I held off discussing academic dishonesty, the specter of which hangs over almost every course in higher education today. But once we account for cheating, we see that this behavior—perhaps the most obvious example of gaming the system—is closely tied to Quadrant One. After all, if rewards are only conferred for outcomes, and the stakes of those outcomes feel very high, the incentive to cheat will also be high. Especially if students see their peers “winning” the college game this way. So, let’s talk about cheating.
Cheating might take more official forms—plagiarism, sneaking answers into an exam, etc. Or, cheating might occur more unofficially, such as intentionally taking a course well below one’s knowledge and skill level. (When universities employ quotas for A grades, the pressure to take “blowoff” courses becomes strong). This is the educational equivalent of the science example used above: exploiting the gap between producing high-quality course deliverables and engaging in a cognitively rigorous, authentic learning process. This is also the domain of Quadrant One.
Then there is the Generative AI factor. Obviously, GenAI did not invent cheating, nor do all cases of GenAI use constitute cheating. But ever since ChatGPT emerged on the public scene, “Big AI” companies have offered students a promissory note: our tools can accelerate and ease the process, so you can “win” at college. And students, having become robust users of these tools, are well aware that GenAI curtails cognitive rigor. GenAI is like a Monopoly square instructing students: “Go directly to Quadrant One.”
When achievement play pervades a gamified institution, and when the means of corrupting the process are mere keystrokes away, it is hard to avoid these consequences. Eric Klopfer, director of MIT’s teacher-education program, nicely encapsulates the incentives: “If it feels like what I’m doing is checking a box that says I’m going to get credit, then it’s understandable why students would want to take a shortcut.”
High-stakes achievement play harms students’ conscientious engagement with coursework, truncating cognitive rigor and, in turn, learning. Put another way, incentives to game the system consistently goad students toward Quadrant One. So, what alternatives do we have?
This is, in effect, the fundamental question I keep confronting in this blog (not just in this series!). Finding productive answers to this question, I believe, requires directing our attention to a different quadrant in the matrix: Quadrant Four. This is where effort is high, but quality is at least ostensibly low. (As I will address in upcoming posts, ostensibly does some heavy lifting in that last sentence.)
The basic idea is to design educational environments where striving play is encouraged rather than achievement play. This means making allowances for students to fumble around in the learning process but still maintaining the integrity of that process, even when the outcomes do not lead to clearly defined, high-quality deliverables.
If such spaces are viable amid the broader gamification of higher education, they will generally lead students toward Quadrant Four. But as we will see, getting students to spend more time in Quadrant Four and less in Quadrant One will be no easy task.