If the prof wanted to make it more of a PD type scenario, he could say that if everyone gets a zero, everyone will get a B.  Further, the test will be a take home test that is e-mailed in.  Now, you have no chance to know if someone is defecting and thus can’t switch to defect yourself, and the reward for defecting if everyone cooperates is an A, which is better than cooperating that gets you only a B and the possibility of an F if someone defects.

The same is true for grading, if people get 100% scores, then you can’t really analyze the performance of the group because they have brickwalled your dataset. If the test is designed to result in a 70% score for someone who really understands the material, it allows you to see who is above that (and maybe why), while not giving Cs to the people who have done what you asked them to do.

It is uncommon for the curve to be so arbitrary (like in this professors example) – usually it is a bit more structured, and still centered around some pre-determined standard of success (that just may be a value less than 100%).

Christ, what an asshole. 

I’ve seen it with my own eyes! Someone actually did that!

If one person refuses to pay his taxes he will likely go to jail. But if everybody refuses to pay what will the authorities do then?

This is how centralized authority succeeds. If you keep the governed population separated into individuals and small groups you can easily subjugate them through fear. But if they organize into larger groups it becomes more difficult to pick them all off.  

Sending a message “it’s all well and good to game the system, but always remember others can game it too, so you’d better be REALLY clever about how you do it” is more appealing to me.

(And of course, if I were the teacher in question, I’d offer a make-up test for the zeros, with a new set of rules for the grading curve… Bill would still get the A though, because it is a brilliant well-executed solution)

A good quality engineer also knows how much damage unqualified idiots can cause.

At any rate — anyone who thinks that what was described in this article is somehow related to the prisoners’ dilemma is not fit to be passing any university level courses — let alone programming ones.

EDIT: And seriously — by your logic — anyone who takes the class, by virtue of being in the class, is able to pass said class — if that were /really/ the case why have a final exam at all? — Spoiler Alert: the harder the school is, the more drop-outs it has — the level 100 and 200 courses are there to weed out the fucktards (i.e. your reasoning is completely the opposite of reality).

As a professional programmer, I interview people all the time who claim to be the next digital messaiah, and yet when asked to demonstrate their skills, they can’t program their way out of a wet paper bag!

Call me a skeptic, but I’m not going to just assume on faith that someone has a highly specialized skill without any demonstration or proof of said skill (especially when most of the people who claim to have said skill — even at the university level — don’t actually have it) — And again — these guys apparently aren’t even bright enough to figure out that this isn’t the actual prisoners’ dilemma.

This is complete bull donk, yo’.

The last factor, the policing, is probably the most disrupted, but it could be avoided by a sufficiently clever “sadist” (such as promising to go along and not showing up that day, but having already taken the test in advance).