Keeping Students Level Somewhat Close

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    I teach 4th grade and have my students all day and all year.  I have had an issue with some students getting WAY behind the rest of the class as far as level goes.  It's impossible for a student 10 levels behind the leader to ever catch up and if unchecked, they will trail the leader by 20 levels by the end of the year.  This can be discouraging and make the lower level students stop caring about their level.

  My solution to this is to "equalize" everyone at the start of every trimester but allow them to keep all their hard work to earn levels.

   I do this by making everyone the same level as the top level student and set all GP to zero.  Thus the leader doesn't lose progress they have already made, but everyone is at the same start point at the beginning of the trimester and has a fresh chance to be the class leader in XP.

Let me know what you think!

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Assuming you use and do Random Events, I would recommend writing some random events that help low XP players. "The lowest XP person on each team gains 300 XP." Etc. Things like that. Or events that target the lowest XP person and give them the chance to dance or sing or recite poetry or something for XP.

Of course, I also have events that specifically target my highest XP person, too. Not always fun to spam the system and gain levels so far ahead of everyone. :)

I do have a random event that boosts the lowest player 1 or 2 levels.  I hadn't thought about one that takes XP from the highest player.  I think I'll have to try that.  :-)

I added a prestige system that resets the entire class every trimester.  This "equalizer" seems to have solved my problem of some students getting way behind and others getting way ahead.

How do you "equalize" each player?  I would love to do this each trimester!

I equalize them by resetting everyone back to level one.  Essentially the entire class is forced to "prestige" and choose a different class (mage, healer, warrior).  

I do this by archiving their characters and having them create a new one on the same account.  They can see all their stuff from the previous trimester in the character archive and they get to try out a new class.  I also level them faster than most teacher so that by the end of the 3rd trimester everyone has tried all three classes and has gotten most of the powers.

This keeps my slow leveling students from falling to far behind and my fast levelers from getting to far ahead. I show the prestige by placing a ♕ in their name if they were forced to prestige and a ♛ if they were able to prestige before the "purge."  

Early prestige is judge by them training all the pets, which you can't do until you have all the armor sets and have logged in consistently to train them.  Both challenging and fun.  

I build interest in this system by having things like fun chairs and disputes over books decided by level and prestige level.  Meaning if a student is level 10 and another is level 11, the level 11 student gets the special chair.  But if a level 10 black crown disputes a level 10 white crown, the black crown gets the chair.  All prestiged characters out rank not prestiged characters regardless of level. 

By the end they should all have at least 2 crowns to show they have prestiged the two previous trimesters. 

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