• meeshen@vegantheoryclub.org
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      6 months ago

      For my graduation (non-American country btw), the top like 30 students in school got awards. I was at place 21 or 22 and got like the equivalent of $100. The girl who got #1 (and she had like perfect grades all around, with a shitload of extracurriculars etc) won some fancy language trip across Europe or some shit, said to be worth like $4000.

      Prior to the graduation ceremony I had no idea they were even giving out prizes lol, best I ever got before that was a book

      • MF_COOM [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        6 months ago

        Like cash though? Grants and scholarships for grads is one thing but cash for best grade in class just sounds like made-up bullshit

        • meeshen@vegantheoryclub.org
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          6 months ago

          The “minor prizes” like the one I got were checks to be cashed in, the perfect score girl prize was more like a grant though.

          And yeah I too was surprised and while I was happy at the time (which kid wouldn’t, right), it does feel weird now lol. My guess is that they fucked up their budget for the year and needed to burn the money for tax reasons?

    • Lerios [hy/hym]@hexbear.net
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      6 months ago

      idk about best grade, but in my university people performing “significantly over expectation” in the first year got 1000€. i think it was to stop the nerds realising that we were actually way overqualified for the school we were in and transferring out. it was directly wired into our banks though, not cash - honestly i didn’t know about it at first and called my bank incase i was being scammed lol. it might have been a STEM only thing?

  • GalaxyBrain [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    6 months ago

    This is totally fake, that money would come in scholarship form. However, I have pulled this off when teachers tried to have us compete for smaller rewards. We could all just like, not work and everyone be guaranteed something instead of all of us doing a thing and one person getting the full reward and the rest getting jack shit. It was late elementary school and the reward was just like, a big thing of candy or something. Got to use it as an example in my final social studies paper in high school where we had to do an essay on the fundamental nature of competition, I guess I was the only thoroughly against guy and one of the few teachers I really respected said it changed his views, dude was pushing 60 and a pretty smart guy. Wish I still had a copy, I was pretty on fire there. Really all I had to do was contrast it with cooperation, show the obvious math of who gets what and once my 17 year old ass had that dawn on me I was off to the damn races. Something really clicked that never unclicked and getting confirmed that I was on the ball in a big way by a pretty Whiplash style teacher (he got fucked out of retirement when a house he bought had a sewage treatment plant built across the street and he then moved cause of stank and sold the house at a major loss, and really did try his ass off at teaching but expected a degree of discipline that most kids couldn’t handle, the school had laptops avaliable basically at all times to haul into classes but no one used em cause it was 2007, so he got em out for every class, gave us every single question for the entire semester in one bigass folder and said ‘here ya go, you know where the library is, I teach 5 classes and will be grading papers, if you wanna talk to me about anything that comes up, I’m right here. Ya got 4 months to handle this, go off.’ I LOVED IT. Especially for social studies. I got to blast through the writing down populations or whatever first and then really sink my teeth into stuff I wanted to know about. Other kids played games on the computer. I gave a lot of fucks about the subject so I wanted to do the work but also found out I do my best learning independently but with access to people who know what they’re talking about.)