Race Condition

noun

Race condition is a term borrowed from modern computer science, where "two signals race eachother to compete for output."

It's implications for student productivity is a little bit different and only applies during group projects. A race condition in a group project setting is assigning the same task to two group members. Usually race condition is applied unwittingly: one person on the project ends up doing most of the work anyway.

Although forcing race condition onto a subject seems like a duplication of work, it tends to work for a few reasons. First, each person in charge of doing the task is required to produce 100% of the work. There is no room for the "Oh, my partner will take care of it." Second, a merge of the two efforts often produces an even better product. If race condition is being applied regularly in a class, chances are the projects are far too small of scope for in relation to the size of group.

This is an original idea developed by HackCollege and influenced by modern computing.