You betcha (money was king), though a good performance would often result in a double promotion for no extra charge, and on very rare occasions a triple would be awarded (I have only ever heard of two of those, for reasons explained below). A new belt costs a few dollars and a stripe maybe twenty cents, therefore there is a greater profit margin in stripes.
I like that name because it says it all. It used to be sold to us as a form of pyramid structure: loads of newbies to keep the system moving, with fewer students of each successive rank and a small number of BBs at the top. Whilst that sounds like a natural progression, there was far too much emphasis on recruiting, and if there was an exodus of middle ranks then it was nothing to award multiple promotions to lower ranks to rebalance the class. If a class started to become stable and more senior belts stuck around (surely a good thing?), the master would make some of them wait until they were allowed to grade again, despite being more ready (relatively speaking) than others who were getting the nod. Inevitably, some of them became discouraged and left, which rebooted the system.
I hated everything about it, it was all so shonky. Mostly promotions were justified, but I remember one occasion when there were between thirty and forty candidates and that the master was in a foul mood and failed some people (who really shouldn’t have even been there, but my instructor was always being pressured to bring in more income. About the only thing that didn’t happen that could have made it worse, was that failed students did not need to pay for their next test). Anyway, that wasn’t the thing that the class found interesting: since there were so many candidates, the master / examiner didn’t keep track of everyone’s application forms, so not only did he fail some of them, because there were so many people to look at and he didn’t like going over time, he passed everyone else based on minimal floor time and even (you will like this) passed one student who was absent (whose brother-in-law failed LOL).
Jeez, that was my first master and he was unprofessional beyond belief. It was nothing for him to turn up an hour late to a grading because he was playing the pokies at the pub, and once he rang to tell my instructor that he was overseas and couldn’t make it to grading at all, even though we had already been waiting for him to turn up for forty minutes. Most of the class couldn’t stand the man, but they generally stuck around because our instructor was trying his hardest to do it right and we all knew it. When he left, we saw it as a really good opportunity to try to change the system, which was probably naïve and something I hear from non-instructors all of the time (“If I was the instructor…”) but we got there in the end.
Incredibly, there is still one fellow getting about who always heaps praise upon that first master, and criticizes the steps we took to focus on quality over quantity. He used to cite: “I don’t see why you’re doing these things, I never had to when I was training for my BB.” There are still others like him out there as well. I heard a similar story from one of the karate schools in the next postcode down the road. One of the BBs actually said to the principle: “What gives you the right to modify the syllabus?” To which the pointed reply: “By right of this being a business that I own and administer.” (I see the irony there: I had done the same thing with a crooked master with regards to his own organisation. The difference was that one of those principals only cared for standard, the other for money. And the students were able to discern the difference, and I was in a position to take positive action. It’s weird, even after twenty years I still feel dirty for doing that even though it was the right thing to do. You would be surprised at the number of traditionalists who have accused me of not respecting my master, and yeah, it affects you.)