Paying Kids for Test Scores

[Rich Gibson <rgibson@pipeline.com>]

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/01/16/19collegecol.h27.html




Published Online: January 14, 2008
Published in Print: January 16, 2008

College & Careers


Tying Cash Awards to AP-Exam Scores Seen as Paying Off




Is there anything wrong with receiving $500 for a 
test score? What if that inducement seems to help 
pull up SAT scores and college-enrollment rates among disadvantaged students?

A 
<http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/cheri/wp/cheri_wp107.pdf>recent 
study by C. Kirabo 
Jackson<http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html>
Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader
, a professor of labor economics at Cornell 
University in Ithaca, N.Y., answers neither of 
those questions. But as money-for-achievement 
programs grow in New York City and elsewhere, the 
research pours new fuel on the debate over 
whether remuneration works in education and what the trade-offs are.

Published last month on the Cornell Higher 
Education Research Institute?s Web site, the 
study found that when students and teachers in 
disadvantaged Texas public schools were offered 
up to $500 for each passing Advanced Placement 
score, AP participation and scores rose.

Yet Mr. Jackson said the main spur for the score 
jumps at the schools in Texas? Advanced Placement 
Incentive Program, or APIP, didn?t seem to be cash.
See Also
Should students be given the chance to cash in on 
their AP scores? 
<http://www.edweek.org/ew/section/tb/2007/11/14/4277.html>Join the discussion.

?I can?t say conclusively if it was or it wasn?t, 
but what I heard from guidance counselors was ? 
that it changed the culture of the school,? he said.

Suddenly, for example, AP classes were no longer 
seen as cripplingly uncool, he said, but a way to buy a new iPod.

----------
Though the cash awards were limited to AP tests, 
the students? achievements were not.

Comparing college-entrance-exam scores at schools 
before APIP and three years afterward, Mr. 
Jackson found an average 33 percent net increase 
in students scoring above 1100 on the SAT or 24 
on the ACT. That gain was over and above 
increases that the schools would have been 
expected to see otherwise, based on comparable schools.

Over that same period, schools also registered an 
8 percent net increase in students enrolling at 
Texas colleges following their adoption of APIP, 
again taking into account increases experienced by non-APIP schools.

One critic of financial-incentive programs, 
Ronald E. Chennault, an education professor at 
DePaul University in Chicago, called APIP 
?potentially problematic,? but ?better designed 
and more careful? than New York?s cash-for-grades 
program, which pays students small sums to take 
standardized tests and bigger amounts to earn perfect scores.
By <http://www.edweek.org/ew/contributors/scott%20j..cech.html>Scott J. Cech