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Comment by gsck | Hacker News Reader

We had something like this in our school called Accelerated Reader. Read books answer a quiz on it get points, best class/student got rewarded.

Was really easy to game though. Our school library had a selection of books for what I can only assume were for special needs kids, really really simple books very few words with even fewer pages. These books rewarded an appropriate amount of points however so you got less, but you could easily bang out 20 of those books in one class and get a lot more points than you'd be rewarded for reading a real book.

A few of us would just go over grab a bunch of those books and read through them in like 2 minutes and complete the quiz.

They ended up not letting those books get used for AR

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We had Accelerated Reader in my public school in Texas in the early 2000s.

It was a pretty cool system.

The lottery system described upstream is terrible.

But with Accelerated Reader you would accumulate points that you could spend on things like the Scholastic Book Fair (buy books), slices of pizza for lunch, and various toy gadgets. Sometimes a teacher would sell some gimmick like a get out of homework ticket.

Of course, you'd have to read a good number of books to receive any of these prizes. But you were always working towards something unlike a lottery system which isn't motivating at all.

My friend group got busted for gaming AR and we were banned from it. The interface allowed us to sort the books by points, so we took the top 10 books, split them up among us, summarized them, took the tests, and gave each other the answers. The jig was up when they printed a leaderboard and we were all way ahead with an absurd number of points. They took them all away and we weren’t allowed to participate anymore.

I gamed AR in the early '90s when it was much simpler. I was in elementary school, and they counted a book as a certain number of pages read (as certified by a parent), the multiple of which increased as you grade number increased. So in third grade every 30 pages counted as a book. So I read my family's complete collection of Dr. Seuss books, as well as my own, like the Boxcar Children. By the end of the program I'd read "93" books.

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