College Professor Tortures Students With Cruel Extra Credit Question

Photo: Doug Menuez / Forrester Images (Getty)

Taking exams are bad enough, but one professor decided to change things up a bit by offering extra credit with a cruel consequence.

“Here you have the opportunity to earn some extra credit on your final paper grade. Select whether you want 2 points or 6 points added onto your final paper grade. But there’s a small catch: if more than 10% of the class selects 6 points, then no one gets any points. Your responses will be anonymous to the rest of the class, only I will see the responses.”

So, in a nutshell, you opt for more points and there is a chance that you nor anyone else in your class gets extra credit.

The professor, Dr. Dylan Selterman, a psychology lecturer at the University of Maryland, explained his extra credit question.

“I’ve been doing this exercise every semester since the first time I taught at the college level in 2008. Only one time did students stay under the threshold for the selfish option (I think that was a random fluke).”

“In reality, if too many people overuse a common resource then everyone in the group suffers, not just the selfish ones,” Selterman added.

Selterman himself had to answer the exact question when he was a student at John Hopkins, and he was upset when the majority of his classmates chose the higher option.

When they aren’t exhausting all their sources making these type of questions to students, maybe they can pose a question where they ask me how I pretty much bend over for my college every time I make a monthly loan payment.

Via A Plus