A System Without Incentives Pt. 2

In my post a few days ago, I detailed one of the reasons for senioritis, chiefly that the GPA scale is based on a 4.0 scale, and that there is no difference between a 90% and a 99%. As if to add insult to injury, most of my teachers...

2. Give assignments that are not graded, but checked for completion (credit-based).

Before I go into a criticism of the checked-for-completion homework system, I'd like to give an example of a teacher who has it right. My junior year pre-calculus teacher knew how to work the system. He would give us our homework just as any other teacher does, but he would check eight random problems that we did. Not only that, he would grade our homework out of five (aka a lot of extra credit).

If we examine this system a bit, it becomes clear what is missing from the traditional credit-based system. Not only does it encourage sloppy work, it doesn't even encourage one to do his own work. Assume that I am a rationally thinking student thinking to maximize the value of my resources (time). Because the work is credit based, I will choose to do a poor job while spending little time rather than doing superb work that takes much time. The simple reason for this is that there is no difference between quality work and garbage work in a credit-based homework system. Why waste the extra resources when they contribute to nothing? By the same token, why even do your own work? Because copying homework poses a very small risk of getting caught in a credit-based system (as, by definition, the teacher is not closely checking the work;otherwise it would be graded), a rational individual who truly wishes to maximize his returns on his limited resources will choose to copy someone else' homework.

I understand the teacher's rationale for using a credit-based homework system: it's simply too convenient. With little to no work, the teacher can get his students to do work with minimal checking. However, they may not realize the perverse incentives system it creates. For maximum effect, may I suggest trying my pre-calculus teacher's method? I am in no way suggesting that it is perfect; grading eight problems and putting it out of five created large amounts of extra credit that brought out the worst of the GPA issue I discussed in my earlier post. However, such a system is indeed much more efficient at achieving the ultimate goal: to get students to quality homework.

I, of course, am no where near rational or amoral enough to cheat, but I have found myself spending less and less time doing worse and worse work. I believe this post explains the reasons for this.

If I began with an example of an exemplary teacher, I'd like to end with a not-so-exemplary one. The following teacher taught me a certain social studies related class, and I will never forget the work (or rather the lack of it) that I did in that class. All of the homework that we did was tracked by pages and lines. For example, we would have to take a page of notes, write a three line answer, or answer the question in a paragraph. You get the point. The result? Every student in the class had a wide ruled notebook, wrote in gigantic handwriting, and finished sentences on the beginning of a line.

Incentives matter. Q.E.D.