How Will Students Respond If We Give Them 50 Points No Matter What?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder predicts that students will quickly figure out they can do nothing and still earn half credit — and many will choose exactly that.
Key Takeaways
- Students are rational actors - If doing nothing earns 50 points, students will logically do less work
- Incentives shape behavior - Grade policies that reward non-completion incentivize non-completion
- The policy undermines itself - A minimum grade designed to help students actually reduces their motivation to do the work that produces learning
Transcript
If 50 is the lowest possible grade, how does it affect students?
How can we expect students to respond if we have a policy that says even if you don't turn in an assignment, you're going to get at least a 50 on it?
And if you do no assignments for a long time and then do a few assignments and you can bring your grade up to passing, how will that affect students?
I think it's easy to look at the students who are the least motivated right now, right?
The students who started off on the wrong foot, they're definitely going to fail and say, okay, how can we motivate them to start trying again?
And it's easy to put a policy in place that magically gives them points that bring them up to passing without thinking about how it's going to affect other students, right?
Like, obviously, students who are discouraged and not doing anything, there's nowhere to go but up, right?
So that could be a good reason to do something.
But we have to think about the impact of what specifically we do on everybody else.
What about the students who have kind of barely passing grades right now but are trying?
what impact would we expect on them?
And think about it, these are the students who are trying, but who are least likely to succeed among those who are trying, and yet who are much more likely to benefit from their education than students who are not trying at all.
If you look at that policy as a student and say, okay, I've been busting my tail to get a 65 or a 70 on my assignments, I could get 50 points for doing nothing, What would you do?
Rationally, logically, what would you do?
See, kids are smart.
I think we always have to remember that kids are smart and they figure stuff out quickly.
They figure it out more quickly than district administrators do because they have sharper incentives for figuring out how to work the system in their favor.
They're just not gonna do their work.
And what's going to happen when they stop doing their work?
This is really crucial.
They are going to stop learning.
They are currently learning.
They are making an effort.
They are putting forth the effort that it takes to pay attention and at least try.
to get whatever points they're getting.
And if we say, well, you get a 50 for doing nothing, we're destroying their incentive to do that.
We're destroying their motivation to do that.
And we're saying, you're actually kind of a sucker if you do your work because you're gonna get 50 points no matter what.
And remember the 50 points that we gave to the kids who weren't motivated, don't give them any learning, right?
They're not learning anything from those 50 points.
Now they're learning if they try and to whatever extent they try.
But if the extent of their trying is like 10 or 20 points worth of effort to get them from a 50 to a 60 or a 70 so they pass, they're probably not going to learn that much and they're certainly not going to learn as much as the many more students who go from kind of trying and not getting great grades to not trying at all and still getting not great grades.
Then of course we have to think about what about all the students who have been trying, who've been putting forth a good effort and getting good grades.
Well, now we've said that the first 50% of your effort is a waste.
We were gonna give you those points anyway, even if you did nothing.
I think that sends just a terrible message, develops a terrible work ethic in our students and makes them worse off.
And that's what bothers me so much about arguments from equity, right?
The argument that we should do something out of a commitment to equity only makes sense if it's a smart thing to do, if it's actually helpful to students.
You can't use equity to justify dumb ideas, right?
That's just a bad argument.
And if this makes learning less for everybody to give students 50 free points, then I don't think we can make any kind of argument from equity.
So I think we've just got to really think through the basics, through the fundamentals of motivation and the incentives that we're putting in place.
I don't think this policy of 50% being the lowest grade could possibly have a positive impact on learning, but let me know what you think.