NOTICE: Please read "Classroom of the Elite: Alter - Self-Test" before reading this.
Picking up on where Self-Test left off, Kiyotaka and his classmates finally reached Class A. However, because of this, Kiyotaka decided to permanently step down a...
The next day after the announcement of the Paper Shuffle, Horikita immediately made her move. After getting permission from Chabashira-sensei, our homeroom period will now be used to discuss how the upcoming short quiz will be handled.
"The tutors' group was able to meet yesterday and we've managed to reach a consensus. We've figured out how our class will be answering the short quiz next week in relation to how the pairs will be decided."
"Woah, you've cracked the code again, Horikita-chan?" Ike asked excitedly.
"It's not as hard as the Zodiac Exam. I'm sure some of you will be able to do it if you tried," she answered. "Now then, we will be making some changes to the tutoring groups. Some of the tutors will be assigned to bigger groups while the rest will focus on making the test questions."
The class started murmuring. Some of them looked excited. Well, it's an opportunity to spend some time with other classmates. After months of working together as a class, you'd think that we're united as one just like Ichinose's Class C. But that couldn't be further from the truth.
According to Abraham Maslow, a key driver of human motivation is the need to fit in, as stated in his theory about the hierarchy of needs. And in order to do that, students form groups and cliques. Cliques play a large part in our class's social system. Some cliques interact often with other cliques who share the same interest, but students from completely different cliques rarely interact. For example, Karuizawa's group might interact often with Matsushita and her friends, but they almost never talk to Kikyou's group.
The last groupings for our study sessions mended that a bit, but since most of us were already doing okay with self-studying, the clique-oriented mindset never really faded. Of course, I'm not saying that there's something wrong with it, but I'm sure the class will work even better together if everyone is on the same page.
"Well, that's just plain idealistic. People are different, after all..." I muttered under my breath.
"We'll be sending a copy of these in the group chat later, but for now, please listen carefully. After some observations, we've concluded that the pairings will be balanced. In other words, the person who gets the highest score will be paired with the person who gets the lowest score, and so on and so forth."
Hirata started writing the details as Horikita explained everything.
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"We plan to make specific pairs, and because the short quiz will be easy, it wouldn't be difficult to shoot for specific scores and perfectly control our pairings." Horikita pointed at Ijuuin's name. "As you've already observed ever since the midterms of the first semester, Ijuuin-kun and the students listed above him would be our top twelve academic achievers. There is a gap between their academic abilities and the rest, so we must guarantee that they are paired with the lowest-scoring students."
We have around twelve students in the class who get scores that are consistently above 80 points, including me. But that's where the streak ends. Some might occasionally get a score of 70 points or above, but Yokoyama and the rest of our class tend to score in the high-to-mid-60s and below. So if we look at it from another perspective, more than half of us are average or below average in academics, which isn't a good thing in general, and is a pretty bad thing for this particular exam where the ratio between bad scorers and good scorers should at least be balanced. (1)
