{"id":321,"date":"2011-03-03T13:46:57","date_gmt":"2011-03-03T05:46:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/?p=321"},"modified":"2024-02-16T21:13:46","modified_gmt":"2024-02-16T13:13:46","slug":"incentives-grading-on-a-curve","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/2011\/03\/incentives-grading-on-a-curve\/","title":{"rendered":"Incentives &#8211; Grading On A Curve"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Tim Harford is an economist who has a newspaper column called &#8220;The Undercover Economist&#8221;. He presents tongue-in-cheek answers to a wide variety of questions from readers. In his book, &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0812980107?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=dmmgfk-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0812980107\">Dear Undercover Economist<\/a>,&#8221; some of his favorite responses have been collected together. Two that really tickled me were related to the practice of grading on a curve.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->The first was from a student, complaining that their economics lecturer was grading them on a curve. Since the number of students getting A&#8217;s or D&#8217;s would be the same, no matter what the <em>average<\/em> performance of the class, the student pointed out that they could all slack off, if only they would <em>all<\/em> slack off. How, though, could they make sure that everyone pulled together to avoid studying?<\/p>\n<p>Tim Harford gave a tongue-in-cheek answer &#8211; act like a stereotypical student body. That is,<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Identify nerds, geeks and study-freaks and punish them.<\/li>\n<li>Organise events that discourage study (parties, etc).<\/li>\n<li>Make sure people share their notes, so that if some students do pull ahead, they pull everyone with them, leaving them no reward &#8211; no incentive &#8211; for their hard work.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The next week, apparently, the students&#8217; professor wrote in, complaining that his students had formed a &#8220;let&#8217;s not work&#8221; cartel, and asked advice on how to break it up. Tim Harford gave a tongue-in-cheek answer &#8211; act like a stereotypical awful lecturer.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>To prevent the cartel from identifying studious students, there should be no continuous assessment, just one whopping great big exam.<\/li>\n<li>To minimise the value of note-sharing, and maximise the value of individual study, ensure the exam tests students on obscure points only to be found hidden inside an enormously long book list.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There were other points. Tim&#8217;s answers are really quite funny. In all seriousness, he accepts grading on a curve as a given and explains<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>For students, the logical consequences of this grading policy is to form a cartel and slack off<\/li>\n<li>For lecturers, the logical consequence of the students&#8217; cartel is to become an awful lecturer.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I recommend getting the book (though I enjoyed <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Undercover-Economist-Tim-Harford\/dp\/0345494016\/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1299129631&amp;sr=8-1\">this one<\/a> even more). I guess the real lesson from his examples is that grading on a curve is not such a hot idea. The logical response to it is not at all like we hope students and teachers will behave!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tim Harford is an economist who has a newspaper column called &#8220;The Undercover Economist&#8221;. He presents tongue-in-cheek answers to a wide variety of questions from readers. In his book, &#8220;Dear Undercover Economist,&#8221; some of his favorite responses have been collected together. Two that really tickled me were related to the practice of grading on a &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/2011\/03\/incentives-grading-on-a-curve\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Incentives &#8211; Grading On A Curve<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[222,221,220,209],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=321"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1392,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321\/revisions\/1392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}