UAE tries to increase GPAs by paying students

In an effort to increase student motivation, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is going to try an ingenious new strategy: they are going to pay the university students who have higher GPAs. According to the New York Times, the UAE Scholarship System will pay a monthly stipend to students who major in certain programs (like medicine or engineering) and achieve a grade point average of 3.6 or above.

"Mohammed Al Maskari, a former deputy director of the Abu Dhabi Education Zone, said that they're hoping to cajole students into taking harder classes this way"

Of course, the problem is that this strategy is neither new, nor is it ingenious. This policy will actually make students take even easier classes than they did in the past. If students are paid to keep a high GPA, then every student has an incentive to pursue high a GPA. That means that students will sign up for the easiest courses that they can take...in an effort to boost their GPAs. Of course, this problem already exists -- after all, the reason for the new policy was to convince students to take more difficult classes -- but the problem will now be even worse than it already was. Which is kind of strange; normally, you want to make sure your policies actually do what you want them to do, instead of worsening the issue they were supposed to be fixing.

And that's all without taking into consideration the effect of external motivation on students, which was summed up quite nicely by Edward Deci, a psychology professor who was quoted in the New York Times:

“It is easy to get people to do things by paying them if you’ve got enough money and they’ve got the necessary skills. But they will keep doing it only as long as you keep paying them. And even if they were doing it before, when you stop paying them the behavior drops to a lower level than when you started paying them. We’ve done thousands of experiments on this over 40 years and the data is incredibly robust. There is no evidence that paying people helps them learn — and a lot of evidence that it doesn’t."

Paying the students for getting good grades will reduce their intrinsic motivation to succeed in school, which, again, is the opposite of what the policy is supposed to be doing. And as Mr. Deci states, the evidence is quite substantial and has been accumulating for over 40 years, so this strategy of paying students isn't a new idea either. But it is certainly one that won't work.

For more information about motivation, I recommend the RSA Animate clip of one of Daniel Pink's talks: