Playing God as it relates to school & grades

[TT_fold]

In my opinion, many intelligent kids in middle school and high school have the potential to earn A's in school, but fail to do so due to a lack of motivation or a lack of foresight. As a social experiement, I propose that some eccentric stranger (me perhaps?) pays the kids with the 50 lowest GPAs to do well in school.

For instance, out of a class of 300 8th graders, I would pay $10,000 to any student ranked 251st thru 300th for earning straight As in the upcoming semester.

To me, the pros of this social experiement far outweigh the cons. Just from discussing this with some friends, here are a few basic pros and cons to this experiement.

On one hand, for a relatively trivial sum, you can change someone from a D student to an A student, which can be worth millions of dollars to the individual and/or society down the road. In addition, this experiment allows us to estimate just how many D students are really just unmotivated rather than unintelligent.

On the other hand, many of these D students will become A students for that one semester and then just revert back to D-level work once again when they lack financial incentive to succeed. Many of the D students will be incapable of A-work in the first place without resorting to cheating, and the allure of $10,000 will arguably make cheating more prevalent.

Nevertheless, I can't get away from the fact that there are tons of kids out there who won't respond to even the best teacher in the world, but WILL respond to something as petty as a few thousand dollars. A couple of months' worth of income from online poker has the potential to change dozens of lives for the better.

Either I am a social revolutionary or my idea is inherently flawed. Flame away...

As a note - if we could please avoid discussing semantics, that would greatly enhance the discussion. Let's assume this is a one-time social experiment and that no one can cheat the system by failing classes on purpose just so that the eccentric stranger will pay him to boost his grades the following year.