Professor left $50 for students in a locker, if they read the syllabus
In this photo illustration, United States fifty-dollar bills ($50) seen displayed. (Photo Illustration by Karol Serewis/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
TENNESSEE - Sometimes it pays to pay attention.
A professor in Tennessee says he hid a cash prize in a locker and gave his students simple clues on how to get it if they read the syllabus of his class, but the money remained unclaimed or even acknowledged at the end of the semester.
Kenyon Wilson, the associate head of performing arts at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga told CNN that he placed the hint in the part of his class's syllabus about changes the university had implemented due to new COVID protocols.
It read: "Thus (free to the first who claims; locker one hundred forty-seven; combination fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five), students may be ineligible to make up classes and ..."
Any one of Wilson's 71 students who had followed the clue would've been able to claim a crisp, clean $50 bill from the locker. But none did.
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"It an academic trope that no one reads the syllabus," Wilson told CNN. "It's analogous to the terms and conditions when you're installing software, everyone clicks that they've read it when no one ever does."
Wilson also left a note in the locker congratulating the treasure-finder, asking the person to "leave your name and date so I know who found it."
Wilson revealed his semester-long experiment in a Facebook post and told CNN that the whole thing was in good fun.
"I know my students read, and I don’t expect them to religiously go through word-by-word but if they did, I wanted to reward them," Wilson told CNN.