That makes complete sense to me. I, too, would like to see the maximum value returned to society for my tax dollars.
But that’s why I’ll applaud sending any amount of tax dollars into teacher salaries, so that teachers don’t have to rely on tuition payments. Even if three quarters of the students waste their opportunities and learn nothing, it’s still a better value for my tax dollar than subsidizing highly profitable multinational corporations or slaughtering brown people far away.
There’s what’s considered right and wrong answers, or rather efficient/inefficient strategies regarding how to play the game. I did put scare quotes on for a reason.
It’s no future in academia for me at all. I’ve wasted years of my life for nothing but low wage, unappreciated labor.
Ignoring the fact that a well educated population is likely to have benefits for everyone. It’s worthwhile for society as a whole to invest in.
Or the professor can do the work and write a decent test, then grade on how well students do on it.
Maybe he did. It’s not like they read the rest and knew what was going to be on it. THEY DID NOT SIT FOR THE TEST, so it’s unlikely the problem.
Plus, the comments to the original story was full of people who had classes with the dude over the years, who said he wrote good exercises and exams for his classes and was a fair professor.
Dude, you nailed it!
You just gave me another Adam Curtis doc to check out, thank you! 
I think I learned more watching The Century of the Self than I did across most of high school history (except for my classes with Jim Cerillo in 11th and 12th grade, the man was brilliant, props to him!)
All the people who complain about gaming the system are missing a deeper level: The system of grades for tests is a game itself. Real world doesn’t have written exams. Grades are not the end game; learning and application of knowledge is.
And there was always a possibility that a scab could walk in and take the test so people who cared about their grades had to study in case the scheme fell through. Statistically the people who do that preparing for the worst do better in situations where failure has a high price. There are many situations in life where preparation is only relevant in a minority of situations and this is preparation for those situations.
There are variant strategies to the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. The prisoner’s dilemma itself is, like this case, a single choice made by each player with the payouts arranged to lead to some interesting questions, unlike this case. But for the non-iterated prisoner’s dilemma there are only two choices: cooperate or betray, with the “right” choice depending on the other player’s choice.
I don’t have kids but I’m happy that (here in Germany) part of my tax money goes to fund education – because I don’t like being surrounded by ignorant morons.
I’m not entirely sure it’s adversarial. Other people have made it sounds like this was a final, so all the learning is done at this point, and I know a teacher or two at my alma mater (and where I’d like to return to teach once I go back for grad school) who’d enjoy the stunt, to be honest. It’s a clever way of getting around things, and one that students at my school have joked about in the past.
As far as grading on a curve, I’m going to put myself out and defend it in one particular way:
The way some of my teachers have handled it is this: I’ll curve you up. That’s all. If the class average is above 75, then nothing happens, my bad if I made the test too easy. If the class average is below 75, I’ll push numbers up until the average is 75, that way I’m free to make tests as hard as I like. You never get punished for doing well because the bonus points get carried as extra credit. That was how one of my professors did her curves, and it seemed to work pretty okay. She was pretty embarrassed when she’d design a test that was too hard, though and there was a ~10 point curve.
Another professor I like quite a bit just goes insane with it. He’ll grade you on a curve, but that’s because you’re expected to get a 50 on the exam. He’ll put you through hell, but unless you full-on give up you will never fail his class: he looks for how hard you tried and how much you learned more than how well you did objectively. If you just pay any attention at all in his class you’ll soak up a lot, but he’s the kind of professor who likes assigning unsolved algorithms problems as extra credit 
On the other hand I was a total teacher’s pet in uni…I did TA work for the latter professor, and just took a lot of courses with the former.
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