Comment by juiceland
5 hours ago
Systems like this are not new. When I was in elementary school in the US Midwest, we had a program called accelerated reader, (AR), where you could take tests about books and get points. The longer the book, the more the points. You could redeem the points for candy.
Anyway I was banned from AR in the 5th grade because I learned you could sort the book list by points awarded, so I wrote down the list of most valuable books and checked them out from the library. I convinced a 2 friends to help, one would take the test and write down the questions and then someone else would read the book to get the answers and share them. We ended up racking up like way more points than anyone else and the teachers called out and made us explain.
Ha I also got suspected of this but I actually just read the books. Three musketeers and shogun was particularly lots of points as well as the Harry Potter books.
I had so many points that even though I stopped reading books on the list in 6th (I got into manga). I still placed 1st in my school until the last semester of 8th because of my point lead.
You basically discovered the exploit in gamified reading before gamification had a name. I wonder how many kids today would optimize the points system instead of actually reading the books.
I remember around 5th grade getting in trouble for finding the software to create/edit the AR tests
yea a free candy bar for kids every 50 days for just reading sounds great
Most kids will correctly recognize up front it's not worth the effort.