Professor hid a $50 cash prize clue in the syllabus, but the reward remained unclaimed.
Students are presented with various syllabuses detailing the contents of their classes at the start of each new college semester.
Do pupils, on the other hand, read them thoroughly? A professor in Tennessee put it to the test.
Kenyon Wilson, assistant dean of performing arts at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, decided to include an Easter egg in his music seminar class’s curriculum this semester.
“Thus (free to the first who claims; locker 137; combination 15, twenty-five, thirty-five), pupils may be ineligible to make up classes and…” read the suggestion.
This would have led pupils to a locker containing $50 cash, which would have been given away to the first student who claimed it.
However, when he went to check his locker at the conclusion of the semester, the bill was still there.
Wilson told said, “It’s an academic cliche that no one reads the curriculum.” “It’s like when you’re installing software and everyone clicks that they’ve read the terms and conditions but no one has.”
There were 71 students in the class. Wilson told said that his curriculum doesn’t vary much, although there was some new material this time around with Covid procedures.
“There’s a boilerplate that stays the same every time. The institution requires that we include a lot of legal information at the end of the paper” Wilson went on to say.
“However, on the first day of class, I warned them that there had been some changes and that they should read it.”
Wilson wrote a note inside the locker as he placed the reward: “Congratulations! Please write your name and the date you found it so I know who it belongs to.”
He also made care to place the combination lock in the noon position with a certain number to see if any pupils had tampered with it, but the combination was never turned.
“I had high aspirations, and I’d be just as pleased to have this discussion if one of my kids discovered it on the first day,” Wilson remarked.
Wilson didn’t check his locker until the semester was ended and his final tests were completed.
In a Facebook post, he revealed the unclaimed funds. Students have been “excellent sports” about it, he added.
Haley Decker, a recent university graduate, has taken Wilson’s seminar-style class for the past three and a half years and was one of the students who failed to locate the concealed cash this semester.
“I thought that was amusing,” she said. Decker stated to CNN. “Because this class has the same pattern every semester, students know what to anticipate and don’t study the material as thoroughly as we should.”
Professor hid a $50 cash prize
Decker said she emailed a number of pals in her class about Wilson’s maneuver, and they all thought it was brilliant. Decker remarked, “I believe this was a pretty sensible experiment for Dr. Wilson to test out.” “It definitely made the music students understand that even though the content is repeated, they should still study their syllabus thoroughly.”
It was all in good fun, according to the professor.
“I know my kids read, and while I don’t expect them to go through the book word for word, I wanted to reward them if they did,” Wilson added.
“Everyone was responsible for having no notion that was in there,” Decker remarked.”
We all acknowledged skimming that section of the curriculum because that policy appears in every syllabus for every subject you take,” said the group.
Wilson’s Facebook post not only elicited a response from students but also inspired other professors and instructors around the country. Wilson speculated, “Perhaps spring 2022 will be the most well-read syllabus ever.”
