Professor Ditches Grades For XP System

schliz writes "Like in World of Warcraft, students of Indiana University's game design classes start as Level 1 avatars with 0 XP, and progress by completing quests solo, as guilds, or in 'pick up groups.' Course coordinator Lee Sheldon says students are responding with 'far greater enthusiasm,' and many specifics of game design could also be directly applied to the workforce. These included: clearly defining goals for workers; providing incremental rewards; and balancing effort and reward."

Balance? Yeah, right...

[danaris]

Balancing effort and reward doesn't interest most employers. They're interested in getting the most effort out of their employees for the least possible reward.

If they were to balance effort and reward, they might actually have to (for instance) pay overtime to the programmers who put in 80-hour weeks to meet the deadline...

(Score: -1, Overly Cynical) ;-)

Dan Aris

Re:He should have stuck with the 2000 system

[Jarik C-Bol]

if i had to guess, its the system a few of my professors used. How it worked was, at the start of the semester, you got 2000 points. for every class you missed, you lost like 10 points, every paper was worth 100 points, and if you scored a 98, you lost 2 points obviously. coursework had set points as well, and so on and so forth. At the end of the semester, you had to have like 1600 - 1700 points for a D, 1701 - 1800 for a C 1801-1900 for a B and 1901-2000 for an A or some similar scale. basically, its a normal score tally system, but it makes it a little more simple to determine if you can blow off a test or something. i know i have the scales at the end wrong, because if you did well enough, you could skip an entire test, and still get an A for the class.

Obligatory XKCD

[SpinningCone]

http://www.xkcd.com/189// [xkcd.com]

cuz we're all just sims in some grander game.

Re:Change is motivational

[Karellen]

change brings about a temporary boost in motivation.

That's the Hawthorne effect [wikipedia.org].