3 ms·

Are there benefits to paying students for good performance in school?

7 points by robg 18y ago

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
cdr 18y ago
In my junior high, there was a reading program where you could get some fairly dinky prizes for passing a test to prove you had read a book. I cheated that system pretty savagely - I would skim a book, look up cliff notes on the internet, and then pass the test. I can't say I really enjoyed many of the books I "read", nor remember much about them. In my opinion, any sort of extrinsic "performance"-based reward system is just going to lead to optimizing to the system (rather than learning) and to the system being gamed.
lacker 18y ago
It really depends on how you give out rewards. Give your employee $1 every time they finish 100 lines of code and they will be insulted. Give everyone a surprise $1000 to celebrate a product launch and they will be excited. It seems like scientific studies often ignore this factor because it's hard to measure. So it's no surprise there is conflicted data.
patio11 18y ago
“There are suggestions of students making in the thousands of dollars,” he said. “The stress of that, for kids from homes with no money, I frankly think it’s unconscionable.” There are a couple of options for students from homes with no money to make thousands of dollars at the price of significant stress. Would you prefer they try one of the other ones? "Our children are too stressed" is a high-class problem in every sense of the word.
dw0rm 18y ago
Here in Russia students get money for having good marks at university. And education is free if you pass entrance exams.
timcederman 18y ago
At the University of Queensland you are rewarded with extra postgraduate scholarship money from the university depending on your undergraduate GPA. This entices the best and brightest to stick around and do some research for the university. Seemed to work pretty well too. I can think of one example off-hand who stuck around and did some amazing research for CSIRO and the CS department. After finishing he was hired by Google Australia as the lead for the first release of Google Maps.
amichail 18y ago
A better idea would be to give them marks based on how much money they made from their own startups.

7 points by robg 18y ago

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

cdr 18y ago

In my junior high, there was a reading program where you could get some fairly dinky prizes for passing a test to prove you had read a book. I cheated that system pretty savagely - I would skim a book, look up cliff notes on the internet, and then pass the test. I can't say I really enjoyed many of the books I "read", nor remember much about them. In my opinion, any sort of extrinsic "performance"-based reward system is just going to lead to optimizing to the system (rather than learning) and to the system being gamed.

lacker 18y ago

It really depends on how you give out rewards. Give your employee $1 every time they finish 100 lines of code and they will be insulted. Give everyone a surprise $1000 to celebrate a product launch and they will be excited. It seems like scientific studies often ignore this factor because it's hard to measure. So it's no surprise there is conflicted data.

patio11 18y ago

“There are suggestions of students making in the thousands of dollars,” he said. “The stress of that, for kids from homes with no money, I frankly think it’s unconscionable.” There are a couple of options for students from homes with no money to make thousands of dollars at the price of significant stress. Would you prefer they try one of the other ones? "Our children are too stressed" is a high-class problem in every sense of the word.

dw0rm 18y ago

Here in Russia students get money for having good marks at university. And education is free if you pass entrance exams.

timcederman 18y ago

At the University of Queensland you are rewarded with extra postgraduate scholarship money from the university depending on your undergraduate GPA. This entices the best and brightest to stick around and do some research for the university. Seemed to work pretty well too. I can think of one example off-hand who stuck around and did some amazing research for CSIRO and the CS department. After finishing he was hired by Google Australia as the lead for the first release of Google Maps.

amichail 18y ago

A better idea would be to give them marks based on how much money they made from their own startups.