How to Assign Grades to Tasks so as to Maximize Student Efforts

Abstract

In some classes, students want to get a passing grade (e.g., C or B) by spending the smallest amount of effort. In such situations, it is reasonable for the instructor to assign the grades for different tasks in such a way that the resulting overall student's effort is the largest possible. In this paper, we show that to achieve this goal, we need to assign, to each task, the number of points proportional to the efforts needed for this task.