# If individual performance is Pareto distributed, how should we reform education?

In [The best and the rest: Revisiting the norm of normality of individual performance (2012)](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2011.01239.x), O’Boyle and Aguinis show that individual performance follows a Paretian distribution:

> We revisit a long-held assumption in human resource management, organizational behavior, and industrial and organizational psychology that individual performance follows a Gaussian (normal) distribution. We conducted 5 studies involving 198 samples including 633,263 researchers, entertainers, politicians, and amateur and professional athletes. Results are remarkably consistent across industries, types of jobs, types of performance measures, and time frames and indicate that individual performance is not normally distributed—instead, it follows a Paretian (power law) distribution. Assuming normality of individual performance can lead to misspecified theories and misleading practices. Thus, our results have implications for all theories and applications that directly or indirectly address the performance of individual workers including performance measurement and management, utility analysis in preemployment testing and training and development, personnel selection, leadership, and the prediction of performance, among others.

Currently, systems of formal education assume that individual performance is normally distributed. For example, in all countries that I know of, university grades have a strict upper bound and are at least roughly normally distributed. The PISA tests are another example. Following the release of [PISA results](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment#Ranking_results), “most public attention concentrates on just one outcome: the mean scores of countries and their rankings of countries against one another.”

If it is true that individual performance is Pareto distributed, how should we reform  education?

## An answer: Decouple age from level and have very lax minimum requirements

Here is my (certainly not original) answer: Decouple age from level and have very lax minimum requirements. Structure schools so that students can progress at their own pace in different subjects. Crucially, _make it possible to progress extremely quickly in as little as one subject_.

Let’s say that you’re a math prodigy. We will let you concentrate on math as much as you want, ignoring other subjects. You could start making original contributions to mathematics years earlier, greatly increasing the time you have available for advancing the field. We would allow you to proceed to university without knowing how your country’s political system works.

Instead of worrying about the mean, we would let students follow completely different paths:

1. The majority won’t need a lot of math. They just need to know enough to manage their finances, buy and sell things, et cetera. As long as they have learned the basics, we would let them concentrate on other subjects.
2. A minority needs levels of expertise orders of magnitude greater than that of the majority. This minority would be allowed to follow a very different path.

I could say a lot more about this idea, but I’ll leave it at that. What other ideas should we consider?