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Posts Tagged ‘grades’

How About Paying Parents for Their Kids’ Good Grade? This Guy Is Really Thinking Like a Freak

In  Think Like a Freak, we touch briefly on paying schoolkids for good grades — which, much of the time, isn’t successful. This inspired a note from a reader named Gary Crowley, who describes himself as “an economics major in college many years ago”:

Hey Guys,

Loved Think Like a Freak.

One thought: Why don’t we trying paying parents for kids getting good grades??? If the parents are motivated to make money, from someone else’s hard work, then they’ll make the kids work harder and want them to stay in school.  I think paying the kids doesn’t take  advantage of the leverage of a parent over their child.  Just a thought.

As a child in the feudal system of a blue-collar Irish-Catholic East Coast family, my Dad took great pride in and took the credit for his beautiful lawn. This would be the same lawn that his children did all the work on. Haha. Don’t see why it wouldn’t work for grades. And I’m sure the parents would be just as proud, even if they’re getting paid.

Gary’s note may also be referring to a brief passage in Think about the parents of schoolkids:


How to Game a Grading Curve

Students in three of Professor Peter Fröhlich‘s computer programming classes at Johns Hopkins University recently devised a method to game their final grades.  Frolich grades exams on a curve — the highest grade in the class, whatever it may be, becomes 100 percent, and “everybody else gets a percentage relative to it.”  So students collectively planned a boycott:

Because they all did, a zero was the highest score in each of the three classes, which, by the rules of Fröhlich’s curve, meant every student received an A.

“The students refused to come into the room and take the exam, so we sat there for a while: me on the inside, they on the outside,” Fröhlich said. “After about 20-30 minutes I would give up…. Then we all left.” The students waited outside the rooms to make sure that others honored the boycott, and were poised to go in if someone had. No one did, though.

Catherine Rampell discusses the strategy:


The Inflation of Everything

Inflation is a term most often employed to describe prices.  A too-high inflation rate results in a devalued currency. But what about the inflation of other things in our world? The Economist reports on this trend:

Price inflation remains relatively subdued in the rich world, even though central banks are busily printing money. But other types of inflation are rampant. This “panflation” needs to be recognised for the plague it has become.

Take the grossly underreported problem of “size inflation”, where clothes of any particular labelled size have steadily expanded over time. Estimates by The Economist suggest that the average British size 14 pair of women’s trousers is now more than four inches wider at the waist than it was in the 1970s. In other words, today’s size 14 is really what used to be labelled a size 18; a size 10 is really a size 14. 


A Smart Incentive or Obesity Persecution?

French diet guru Pierre Dukan is urging his government to give extra marks in school for a healthy BMI. The Telegraph reports:

“Obesity is a real public health problem that is rarely – if at all – taken into account by politicians,” Mr Dukan told newspaper Le Parisien ahead of the book’s launch.

Mr Dukan said his education plan would be “a good way to sensitise teenagers to the need for a balanced diet.”

He denied it would punish overweight children, saying: “There is nothing wrong with educating children about nutrition. This will not change anything for those who do not need to lose weight. For the others, it will motivate them.”


College Football Victories = Worse Grades?

Yes, at least for guys. That’s according to a new study (abstract; PDF) by University of Oregon economists Jason M. Lindo, Isaac D. Swensen, and Glen R. Waddell. Drawing on 8 years of data from nearly 30,000 Oregon students, they found that three fewer Ducks’ wins per season would increase male students’ GPA scores by roughly .02 — a relatively minor effect, truth be told, considering that three extra wins in college football is the difference between a good team and a bad one.

The authors attribute the grade drop to an increase in partying and alcohol consumption when the team wins, paired with a decrease in studying. Women also tend to drink and party more when the Ducks win, but the GPA effect wasn’t nearly as strong. So if you’re the parent of an Oregon student, you might be rooting for the Ducks to lose a little more often than they do.


Why Do Only Top MBA Programs Practice Grade Non-Disclosure?

Last spring while I was finishing my fellowship at Columbia Business School, much of the student body was busy trying to overturn the school’s grade disclosure policy. Back then, Columbia was one of the few top MBA programs that did not practice grade non-disclosure, meaning recruiters were allowed to ask Columbia students about their grades. By the end of the year, the issue had passed a student referendum, and this semester Columbia became the latest business school to have a grade non-disclosure policy, which encourages students not to disclose their grades to employers until they’ve been hired.

Grade non-disclosure policies are a quirk of MBA programs. You won’t find them in medical or law school. In fact, the only place you do find them is among top business schools. Of the 15 most selective MBA programs, 9 of them have some form of a grade non-disclosure policy. But of the schools ranked from 20 to 50, none do.

A new paper from a pair of Wharton economists examines why this is.