<p>I think I may have posted this article a while back… too lazy to search!</p>
<p>@JHS: Of course, “You are responsible for your own education”! But when the only lasting evaluation of your work in a class is the final grade, and you know you can pull an A/A-/B+ with some reading period cramming, and there’s a giant crisis with the newspaper (/play/sitcom/conference)… would you put it off to savor Kant at a reasonable pace?</p>
<p>I took a great class on Psychology and Economics, where we learned how horribly irrational people are when it comes to going to the gym. People will grossly and willingly overpay for gym memberships, if the membership is structured so that it incentives going to the gym.</p>
<p>To me, the article seems to be a plea for this kind of help – structure Harvard so that (be it by carrot or stick) students are incentivized to read deeply, rather than skim - to ponder and discuss issues before writing papers, rather than plucking a random idea at 9 p.m. the night before. As students we want to do these things, just like people want to go to the gym… we’d just like incentives to help us do them.</p>
<p>(And for what it’s worth, most of my TFs docked papers by 1/3 of a letter grade for every day it was late (i.e. B –> B-), and I didn’t find the curves in the sciences that “strict” - even premed classes had a mean + median in the high B, low B+ range).</p>