Competition in higher education – good or bad?

Competition is an integrated part of most civilizations, from sports to education. Often competition arise whether or not it was intended and higher education is no exception from this. Should teachers acknowledge this and try to introduce competition as a part of the course or should they try to prevent competition, even spontaneously arisen competition? In this paper an overview of effects of competition reported in literature is presented together with deeper analyzes of how grading affect competition among students, projectbased competition and competition within a class. As always, no one answer is found, competition can be good or bad, but a general trend seems to be that when competition is combined with cooperation good results have been reported. Furthermore, the competitive part of the course should not be the sole factor for grading but rather seen as a complement to regular teaching.