An interesting story about a middle school in North Carolina that was allowing parents to purchase extra credit for their children. As it turns out, that was a controversial thing to do. (Duh.) $20 would purchase 20 test points, 10 points each on two tests. The tests were normalized to be out of 100 points, so you were basically buying your kid a one grade bump on two tests. Here’s the part of the story that made me laugh:

Susie Shepherd, the principal, said a parent advisory council came up with the idea, and she endorsed it. She said the council was looking for a new way to raise money.

“Last year they did chocolates, and it didn’t generate anything,” Shepherd said.

Shepherd rejected the suggestion that the school is selling grades. Extra points on two tests won’t make a difference in a student’s final grade, she said.

What Ms. Shepherd is saying is two things: a) Parents should spend $20 to buy their kids extra credit so that the school can raise money, and b) it will not have any impact on their grade. I don’t know how many tests there are every semester, but a 10% increase on two tests has to have some impact on a student’s grade, doesn’t it? And if there are so many tests that it doesn’t matter, than the PAC is basically stealing the parents’ money, selling them something that is worthless. Either Ms. Shepherd thinks the parents of the children in her school are stupid or she thinks people reading the story are stupid. I’m not sure which.

I’ve flirted with some controversial things with grades in the past, and I’ve often had to ask my colleagues what they thought of it, and have backed away from a few proposals. In my Industrial Organization class at Northern Michigan University, I ran a simulation game based on Severin Borenstein’s Competitive Strategy Game. I’ve used the game, or a variation thereof, all three times I have taught I.O. in my career and the students love it. It applies principles from throughout the course, forces them to use Excel to run simulations and calculate different scenarios, and helps them visualize what they are learning. I can’t get Dr. Borenstein’s software to work any more for some reason so I use an Excel file to run the simulations and that allows me to tweak things and create new markets. It’s more work for me but the result is better and I’m much more in tune with the decisions students are making.

The game accounts for about a quarter of each student’s final grade. It’s a semester-long project with an assignment every week or two (it varies by semester). It can be a lot of work or students can half-ass it and hope to get lucky.  The first time I taught the course, I was not sure how motivated students would be. So to encourage them to really take it seriously, I stated in the syllabus that members of the team that finished in first place would each received one grade shade bump on their final grade; if they had an A-, I would bump them up to an A. But I realized something: the good students are probably going to take the game more seriously, and they’re probably going to get an A anyway. NMU did not allow me to give out A+’s, so a grade bump for these students was worthless. So I decided to give it to them as a property right — they could give it away to a friend or even sell it to another student if they wanted. I would set up an auction for them.

I loved the idea at first, and so did they. Students often consider their grades as their property, but they do not have the right to sell or trade that right. I thought I would experiment with that. But at the end of the semester, I started hearing complaints from some of the other students. They thought it was unfair that someone who did poorly all semester could buy a grade bump from another student. I mentioned that there would be an auction for the grade bumps (two of the three students in the winning group already had an A and therefore did not need theirs) and everybody had an equal opportunity to put in a sealed bid on one of them. Naturally, some complained that this meant the wealthier students would get the grade bump — the same thing complained about in the story linked above.

I did not want to cause a controversy with this, so I did not collect any money from the students who put in the highest bids, and I did not give them the grade bump. I took the two highest bids, averaged them, and gave the two students that owned the grade bumps cash from my own pocket. I thought that was the fairest thing to do — why should they suffer a loss of income because I changed the rules on them? If I remember correctly, it was only $25 or so each. Nobody bought a grade, and the students that earned the grade bump and did not need it received the cash equivalent value.

But there have been other times when I have thought of doing something similar. As it turns out, I’m not the only one considering it. In fact, Michael Baye, the author of the book I use in Managerial Economics, gave an online web conference a few months ago where he talked about something he does in his classes that could easily be construed as grade-selling. He includes class participation in his grades. He also auctions off a few shirts at the beginning of the semester and any student wearing one of the shirts when his or her name is called is automatically immune from questioning and gets 100% that day. Some students keep the shirt in their backpack and put it on before every class. These students have essentially bought a percentage of their grade. He does it so that when he asks students how much they are willing to pay for a good at the beginning of the semester, it’s not just a thought experiment; it’s something tangible, something that has real value to them. He uses the numbers he gets from this experiment to create a demand curve. He uses the numbers to run regressions, to calculate consumer surplus, the profit-maximizing price for a monopolist, and a variety of other things. It’s a running theme throughout the whole course based on an actual tangible good. But still…is he selling grades? Does the fact that he’s selling a shirt make it not so straight-forward?

I have thought of doing something similar in my Managerial Economics class in the future. I don’t grade attendance so the magic shirt idea wouldn’t work. Instead, I thought that students would bid on one of several homework passes. Each homework assignment is usually worth between 5-7% of their final grade and there are 3-4 of them. It’s not hard to get a good grade on homework assignments and most students get at least 80% on them. But if they bought one of these passes, a student would have one freebie and receive 100%. In my mind, I justify it by saying that if a student decides to just not learn the material and use the homework pass, their grade will likely suffer on the next exam, which usually takes place the following week. And I can do the same analysis on the data that Baye does — I’ve seen the Excel sheets he has created with it and he applies the data to almost every concept students learn the entire semester.  It really is a valuable teaching tool. But is it buying a grade? And if it is, is it worth any potential controversy if it has pedagogical value? If I sold magic homework shirts instead, would it be any different?

I’m interested in comments from students and educators.