Comment Re:Cost v Benefit (Score 1) 716
Better yet, don't bother with the other 95% and just pay the $500! You'd save billions!
You may argue that that isn't at all what you said, but your statement is equally ludicrous. You're trusting badly insufficient base data and going off and calculating meaningless resulting figures. Are you in marketing, by any chance?
Have you factored in whether the improvement is sustained, which wasn't tested in the study?
I would bet that removing the rewards would actually make these students do worse than they did before the study started. Have you factored in that possibility?
Has any learning actually increased, or just the test scores? They're nowhere close to being the same -- cheating, cramming, and test-taking strategies are just some of the obvious ways to inflate test scores while keeping learning (of the tested material) constant or declining.
Is there collateral damage? As in, do these students stop studying for any subject that they don't get paid for, or other things in their lives? Might need to factor that in.