
Are there benefits to paying students for good performance in school? - robg
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/health/03rewa.html?ref=health
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cdr
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.

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patio11
_“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.

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timcederman
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.

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lacker
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.

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dw0rm
Here in Russia students get money for having good marks at university. And
education is free if you pass entrance exams.

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

