At my teacher's school, I haven't seen TOP students get into it too much. However, I have seen it happen with beginner students. I remember starting at my wing chun school back in 1995, when I was also attending college. Two of my wing chun classmates (Chris and Alicia) also went to college with me. They started a couple months after me. I ran into Alicia in the library, and we started talking about wing chun. She was aggravated because Sifu had started teaching me chum kiu and chi sao, but he hadn't done so with her or Chris yet. She also expressed anger over something that had happened at class, where Sifu was teaching me something while Chris stood nearby, completely ignored by him. Well, what she failed to realize was that the month was half over, and she and Chris had YET to pay their tuition. Sifu lets people slide and works out deals with them, but you have to TALK to him. Don't show up, not pay and expect his undivided attention. It isn't fair to everyone who paid on time.
Anyway, they stopped coming to class. Sifu mentioned them one time and I brought up my encounter with her in the library. He said, "She didn't learn chi sao because she wasn't ready...and if she thought she was, you should have told her, 'Okay, let's do chi sao right now.'" He also laughed at the part about how he ignored Chris. He said, "He didn't pay...so he wasn't a student."
So as you see, most of the "competition" at our school doesn't really fit that definition. It is more the case of people who are of the instant gratification mindset, who think that learning all 6 wing chun forms in a week makes them a master. But Sifu sticks to his guns: he wants to make sure you have things at least SOMEWHAT refined before he moves you on to the next step. He doesn't care if it makes him lose those kind of students.
