Buying a Grade.

A few years ago if you had asked me my opinion on buying a grade, I would have strongly disapproved. What about paying for extra credit opportunities? Again the answer would be no. I would have only pursued extra credit opportunities if they were free.

However, here I am in my junior/senior year of college and I can proudly say that my opinion has changed. I am taking a statistics class this semester which has been out to get me all year. I have been stressing out about receiving a low grade (a.k.a anything less than an A-) for a while now. Lucky me that a few weeks ago my professor offered the class extra credit if we went and watched the new movie Moneyball. AS ever with paying for extra credit, I was firmly against it. I figured that I would just do really well on my future homework assignments to make up for a low homework score at the beginning of the semester.



Unfortunately I began to see that that plan was not going to work. At that moment, I decided to throw all caution to the wind and go see the movie. I did not want to go to the movie alone so I offered to take Steven as well. I knew very well how much this was all going to cost when I went into the theater, but when I looked at the ticket computer screen my heart dropped. $17.50. That was a ridiculous amount of money for a movie. As I gritted my teeth and pressed the pay button, I noticed another button that said pay with a gift card. Suddenly the I remembered that I did in fact have a long forgotten gift card. For $15! This made the price of two movie tickets only $2.50 or $1.25 each.

Happy with my purchased extra credit, I went into class the next week. That week the professor decided that we should have breakfast at the beginning of our 8:00 am class. She passed around a sign up sheet and offered additional extra credit to anybody who signed up to bring breakfast. After already breaking my code once, I decided to go for it again. What would it be, $10? But wait, there were too many students! So we all got to double up our snack day meaning that I would only have to bring half of a snack!

While looking through the local grocery store ad, I saw that Sunny D was only $1.00 a gallon. So I bought three and called that good for a snack. This morning I took in the Sunny D for breakfast, again happy with the extra credit that I received.



In the end I received 200 points of extra credit and it only cost me $5.50! I am quite happy with the way things turned out. I no longer believe that anything about paying for the extra credit was unfair (I did get some juice and a movie out of it). Would I ever do it again? I really don't know.