[ItsMonkk]

If I was a Professor teaching the same class to two different sections, it would be really neat to give the entire winning section extra credit based on the difference between the average values of the two sections. This would encourage group study and would ultimately lead to students helping their other classmates out. And since teaching is the best way to learn, everyone would do better.

Maybe you don't even need two sections. Just split the class into two teams? Has this been tried anywhere?

[feoren]

That's still a "student vs. student" mindset, just one that incorporates a form of collective punishment, which is against the Geneva convention. It's an absolutely atrocious idea.

[notriddle]

The problem is that, if both teams are randomly selected, then they should be expected to have equal underlying performance, and the only thing your grades are measuring is noise. It is unfair when one winds up with a team that happens to contain outlier students through sheer luck of the draw.

The law of large numbers would smooth these kinds of things out, but a single semester is not a very long time, and we don't want classes to have large numbers of students.