This sort of thing — grouping incoming students based on prior ability — is fairly common in introductory foreign-language courses. If you don&#x27;t do this, it&#x27;s extraordinarily difficult to teach at a pace that isn&#x27;t generally too fast for the newbies and isn&#x27;t generally too slow for the people who have done this before.<p>As someone who&#x27;s suggested moderately overcomplicated solutions to introductory problems: that doesn&#x27;t sound like social awkwardness to me. It sounds like people trying to be helpful who don&#x27;t have any experience thinking about questions like &quot;how can I help this other person solve this problem without introducing twelve entirely new concepts and four calls to an entirely new API?&quot;