Monday, August 28, 2006

Reverse Incentives

Another hilarious interlude, from my Discovery prof:

"So the grade from this course will come from two or three short papers, about 3 pages each. If the first paper you guys hand in is good, you'll get assigned two more papers. If the first one is lousy, you'll only get one more paper assigned."
[At this point there was an uproar of confused laughter. A weird incentive plan or did he make a mistake? we wondered.]
He explained:
"Because if the first paper is lousy I don't wanna read a whole extra set of lousy papers."

Great prof.

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