Charlotte Rayn - Incentivizing Good Grades -04.... May 2026

It started simply: for every A on a test or major project, Charlotte would receive fifty dollars. B’s brought twenty. Anything below a C? A deduction from her monthly allowance.

For the first few weeks, Charlotte did see. She stayed up late drilling Spanish verbs. She re-read chapters of The Scarlet Letter until Hawthorne’s guilt felt like her own. Her first history test earned an A-. Fifty dollars appeared in her Venmo account. She bought a vintage sweater and felt, for a moment, like a genius. Charlotte Rayn - Incentivizing Good Grades -04....

Charlotte looked at the grade, then at the fifty dollars that appeared in her account. She didn’t buy anything. She let the money sit there — a quiet reminder that some incentives work too well, and that the best reward for learning might be learning itself. It started simply: for every A on a

For Assignment 04, she and Mateo argued that while rewards could boost short-term effort, they eroded intrinsic motivation. They cited studies, added graphs, even interviewed her father (who grudgingly admitted, “Well, when you put it that way…”). A deduction from her monthly allowance

The trouble started with — a collaborative ethics paper in her philosophy class. The prompt asked: Is it ethical to reward students for grades?

But by week six, the cracks showed.

She wanted to say it worked. She had the sweater to prove it. But something stopped her. She thought of the late nights not driven by curiosity, but by cash. The way she’d started avoiding challenging classes. The quiet dread that maybe she wasn’t getting smarter — just better at performing.