Kenyon Wilson is a professor of performing arts at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and this semester, he ran an experiment: hiding a cash prize in a locker and burying the location and lock combination deep in the syllabus. At the end of the semester, the money was still there.
He told the story in a Facebook post which soon caught the attention of media (even big names like the New York Times and CNN have run it).
A common takeaway of the story (at least on a few Facebook and forum posts) is "kids these days" followed by some derisive remark. But Professor Wilson doesn't believe skimming the syllabus makes someone lazy and he's certainly not disappointed in his students.
When he was a student, he most likely would have also missed the clues, he said.
"We read the parts that we deem important," he said. "You know, what's the attendance policy? What are the things I need to do to pass this class? And then there's other stuff."
New York Times
Students told CNN that the clue was in the middle of a paragraph present that is copied and pasted into many syllabi on campus. They'd likely seen the paragraph dozens of times, so it makes sense that they weren't religiously reading it start to finish like a novel.
