The "A" Jar

In my sorority at UVA, we have a fantastic tradition of the "A" jar. When our place fell the year before last on the ISC’s ranking of GPAs, our Vice President of Academic Excellence wanted to again call our attention to the importance of scholarly pursuit. Wisely, this did not occur without incentive. So, in order to promote intellectual prowess at our weekly meetings we now pull a submitted name out of a jar of one member who has received an A on an assignment and they in turn are given a gift card to a local coffee shop, restaurant, etc.

Interestingly, there used to exist a prisoner’s dilemma with the A Jar in which people were motivated to submit their own names (and more than once), whether or not other members did this as well and this resulted in more than one person attempting to use this method to secure the gift card. Public shame was enough to end that problem, but the economic inefficiencies of the jar have not been entirely erased. One of my good friends recently joked with me about her excessive efforts to get multiple other people to put her name in the jar for her. She has even gone so far as to buy coffee for one of the other members who she was meeting to study in exchange for their submission.

Clearly, this has taken her time and her money, as well as her effort, which could have been diverted to actually studying. Furthermore, it will not be the case that she always receives the gift card unless she dedicates more and more of her time, as the likelihood that she gets a few people to vouch for her would at first only result in a few slips of paper are competing against others dropped in by the over 100 girls in the sorority. A great way to stop this issue would be to only allow each girl’s name to carry the weight of one vote, so the odds of it going to any member who received an A that week would be the same. Though it has become somewhat of a running joke, I truly would like to see my friend expend less effort on this for her own sake, and I am likely to suggest this solution next week.