The Advantage of Low Academic Ability

The moment those words fell, the classroom went completely silent.

Class A.

First in average scores.

The class that had stood above everyone else since the first day of school.

Whenever written exams came up, the other classes already felt beaten.

Yet Majima Tomoya had just said that Class A was at a disadvantage in This Exam.

Kazehara Tetsu leaned back in his chair, his eyes on the score chart displayed on the screen. He said nothing.

Most of Class A's students had an Academic Ability rating of A or B.

Under the rules, an A-rated student earned one point per correct answer, while a B-rated student earned two.

With a hundred questions divided among them, even if every answer was correct, an A-rated student who answered five questions would earn only five points at most.

Class C was another story.

Class C had far more students rated C, D, or E than Class A did.

For the same question, a C-rated student earned three points, a D-rated student four, and an E-rated student five.

Even if they got a few questions wrong, as long as most went to students with lower Academic Ability ratings, their total score would climb.

That was the cruelty of the rules.

They didn't reward the class that performed better. They rewarded the class that "performed worse."

The weaker the student, the more their correct answers were worth. The stronger the student, the less they were worth.

Students below had already begun murmuring among themselves.

"Then what do we do? Our Academic Ability is higher, and that puts us at a disadvantage?"

"We're not completely out of options."

Someone nearby chimed in, "Our average Academic Ability is high, so we can answer faster. Don't we get bonus points for time left over? Ten points for