A Recurring Capture Pattern in Educational Evaluation Systems: Why students tend to converge toward failure-avoidance behavior and withdrawal from educational participation

Students tend to converge on behaviors aimed at avoiding failure, such as shunning challenges with difficult problems and staying away from school, under evaluation systems centered on exam performance and academic selection. This paper documents a Recurring Capture Pattern (RCP) observed in educational evaluation systems. Under the institutional condition of a single-outcome evaluation structure centered on exam performance and academic selection, combined with a system in which failure at each educational stage directly affects future opportunities, individually rational behavior systematically converges not toward exploratory learning and active participation in education but toward failure-avoidance behavior and withdrawal from educational participation. As these behaviors accumulate, they alter the operational conditions of the system itself, resulting in increased evaluation pressure, adaptation of schools toward evaluation-optimized education, and reinforcement of avoidance behaviors, and reinforcing the same behavioral convergence through a recursive institutional feedback loop. The pattern ultimately produces a decline in exploratory learning, increased avoidance of educational participation, and erosion of intrinsic educational value, indicating a structural misalignment between institutional objectives and rational behavioral adaptation. This paper analytically describes the structural relationship between institutional design and rational behavioral adaptation.