When my eldest daughter was in high school (~2010, Argentina) there was a provincial policy where if every single student had a result below a certain score in a test, the scores had to be re assessed against the maximum result.
The resulting situation here was that she was constantly bullied into underperforming. Both cases are actually similar in that each individual has a personal incentive to underperform - the difference is that in your friend's case the policy is granted at the company level so no single employee can defect and break it for the rest, while in my daughter's case one high scorer could invalidate the reassessment for everyone, which is exactly what made defection punishable and the bullying emerge naturally.
This is the natural result of "equity" which is the academic jargon term for "forced equality of outcome". High achievers are attacked. People who push us forward are demonized. The low achievers are never pushed to be better. And the average drops.
Can you link a source for it? That sounds too absurd to be true…
It’s not that absurd and happens all over the world in university systems. I had a Comp. Sci. Professor that taught assembly and graded on a curve. As you might imagine the one guy that was a wizard at assembly caught flak from the unwashed masses.
I had another professor that not only did a curve but dropped statistical outliers to prevent this problem, he literally explained his system on Day 1 of the course. This was 15+ years ago and by no means a new idea.
The future is not evenly distributed.
I tried to search for it, but even the 2 documents that superseded the one from around the time my daughter was at school at not available.
I mean, the site doesn't even have a valid secure certificate so...
In the site below (In Spanish) you can search for 10/2019 and a cursory translation of the document title will show that this is the proper document (For 2019 onwards, the replaced doc 04/2014 isn't available either)
https://koha.chubut.edu.ar/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl?idx=k...