Her father kept the chart on the fridge, but after that semester, he added a new line at the bottom: Bonus for teaching Dad something new — $100.
She wanted to say it worked. She had the sweater to prove it. But something stopped her. She thought of the late nights not driven by curiosity, but by cash. The way she’d started avoiding challenging classes. The quiet dread that maybe she wasn’t getting smarter — just better at performing. Charlotte Rayn - Incentivizing Good Grades -04....
Charlotte looked at the grade, then at the fifty dollars that appeared in her account. She didn’t buy anything. She let the money sit there — a quiet reminder that some incentives work too well, and that the best reward for learning might be learning itself. Her father kept the chart on the fridge,
The trouble started with — a collaborative ethics paper in her philosophy class. The prompt asked: Is it ethical to reward students for grades? But something stopped her
For Assignment 04, she and Mateo argued that while rewards could boost short-term effort, they eroded intrinsic motivation. They cited studies, added graphs, even interviewed her father (who grudgingly admitted, “Well, when you put it that way…”).
But by week six, the cracks showed.
The Price of an A