Crab Mentality, Cyberbullying and "Name and Shame" Rankings

This paper examines the hypothesis that in a country where disclosure of higher than average achievement can be considered an appropriate justification for bullying, students are more likely to do badly in exams and collude more in assessed course work to ensure that their grades do not stand out. We examine this hypothesis by measuring how students perform when their position in a class is reported with different levels of perceived privacy. We start by defining what we mean by privacy in rank reporting before discussing a novel rank reporting approach that has higher privacy than traditional approaches. We then provide results for case studies where a traditional and the new higher privacy rank reporting approaches are used with students at a New Zealand university. The results indicate that over 70% of the students are concerned with the privacy of traditional rank reporting approaches and that average student performance may be affected by almost 20% by these concerns.