Game Theory Contest $100 prize.

[TJ Eckleburg]

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Georgia has the HOPE Scholarship, where any GA resident can get a free ride to any GA state school, as long as they maintains a 3.5 GPA. (This is not easy.) It's paid for by the GA Lottery. (LOOKIT! I brought the discussion back to gambling games!)

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Not to be a nit, but it's 3.0. This guy happened to get a 2.98 his freshman year... took a year off, tried to come back... and dropped out officially last fall.

No worries, though... they did me a favor, and I have a great job now and can play poker whenever.

Anyway, if you hate academic cheating, then I can tell you FOR SURE that the HOPE scholarship has done a LOT to encourage academic dishonesty (at least at UGA, where I was).

[SamIAm]

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I can tell you FOR SURE that the HOPE scholarship has done a LOT to encourage academic dishonesty

[/ QUOTE ]I agree that it makes academic performance matter more, which in turn is correlated to more academic dishonesty. It's probably impossible to do the first without doing the second. I'm not so big on measurement and competition on grades, but I don't feel so bad about it.

HOPE is still the best use of the house winnings of a state lottery that I've heard. I know the lottery is a bad bet inflicted on poor people that are bad at math, but given that you have a lottery, the scholarship is a concrete way to use the money. Too many states pretend that lottery money builds roads or something, when in fact they just move the previous road-money into something else, and we have no idea what the lottery is actually funding.
-Sam

P.S. Lookit. I used probability gambling words (in bold) above, just like this was a Probability forum. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]