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Students Exploited Their Teacher's Curved Grading To Get All A's

Peter Frohlich teaches programming at Johns Hopkins University, and he grades on a curve. In his class, the top mark always equals 100 percent. Even if there are 100 questions and the best student gets 70 right, that becomes 100 percent, and every other student is graded in relation to that. He says it's a good way to judge everyone relative to their peers -- and really, if everyone screws up a question, you have to admit maybe it wasn't taught correctly. The students, however, noted a flaw in the plan: Everyone could get an A by simply agreeing to do nothing.

For the final exam in 2015, every student in the classes Frohlich taught boycotted the exam. They all showed up and waited outside to make sure no little sneak-thief would ruin it for everyone, and no one did. Everyone got 0. After all, why would anyone defect when the only thing taking the exam could do is ensure a worse grade for everyone else? As long as all were united, it was better to take the 0 that would become a perfect score when curved.

Realizing he'd be screwed over by his own rules, Frohlich had the good grace to at least praise the students for coming together as a group to work for their mutual benefit, and honored his own cockamamie policy by giving everyone an A. But he did change his standards after that to allow himself the right to stick it to anyone he felt was trying to game the system.

3

A Guy Took A $60,000 Luxury Flight ... For $300

I can count the number of flights I've taken on one hand, if that hand is holding six things in it. And I've never flown first class, with the most luxurious thing I've ever experienced on a flight being a flight attendant giving me a whole can of Pepsi instead of that shot glass full of ice I've had on every other flight. But I'd like to know what it's like to fly as a rich person, and so did travel blogger Sam Huang. The problem is that the specific Emirates flight he wanted to take is so fancy that it costs $60,000. That's more than most bloggers make in, well, an eternity.

If that price sounds insane for a flight that doesn't land on Mars, keep in mind that we're talking about a luxury experience intended to convince billionaires to do this instead of taking the teleportation devices we all know they secretly have -- and he wanted to take a trip around the world. So in order to experience it without breaking the bank, Huang managed to plot out the most baffling string of loopholes and workarounds to get the flight for only $300.

The entire process is detailed at length on Huang's website, but it involved using a hell of a lot of frequent flyer miles and transferring bonus miles from one source to another to another, maximizing as much as he possibly could. He had to book it as one flight with a hell of a lot of layovers -- he stopped in 11 cities across seven countries. And to get a lot of those miles, he signed up for credit cards. Lots and lots of credit cards which offered miles as bonuses. Once he had 100,000 miles racked up after several months of balancing up to 15 credit cards, he was good to go.

2

A Woman Finds A Way To Be An Olympian Without Getting Good At A Sport

Elizabeth Swaney competed in the Winter Olympics on Team Hungary after 110 percent gaming the s**t out of Olympic regulations. If Olympic tomfuckery were an event, she'd rightly win the gold. But it's not.

1

To Avoid A Drinking Ban, Some Revelers Built An Island

Here's a problem too many of us can relate to: We want to get shitfaced in public, but the man is all like, "Unshit that face, or else!" So now you're drinking a goddamn Pomme Baya La Croix on the boardwalk like a fancy vagabond. Well, a group of intrepid kiwis (the people, not the fruits or the birds) were not about to let their New Year's celebration be unshitted by anyone, the laws be damned.