City Students Will Cash In For Top Test Scores

New York City public school students will have another opportunity to turn high test scores into cash this year, thanks to a private project that is offering as much as $1,000 for a top score on an exam. The program, the brainchild of a hedge fund manager who has made improving public schools a serious hobby, is promising students at 31 city high schools a sliding scale of prize money if they pass college-level tests called Advanced Placement exams. A perfect 5 out of 5 yields $1,000; a 4 earns $750, and a 3, the lowest passing score, gets $500. Schools will also receive checks calculated to match their students' improvements.

At a Harlem high school where the program will be announced this morning, students last week had been briefed about the new incentives, but they did not yet know their amount. "It's a thousand?" a senior from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Jalea Moses, her eyes lighting up, asked the principal when he let the top number slip. Smiling, the principal, Gregory Hodge, acknowledged that $1,000 was the top prize.

Dr. Hodge, who had already given out prizes of $150 to students who scored 5 on the test, said the program will help his top students — such as Ms. Moses, who won the school's first-ever 5 on an AP statistics exam last spring — cover the costs of applying to colleges as seniors, such as the $60 and $70 application fees top universities charge. It will also push students who are less driven to model top students' habits, he said.

Getting more low-income students to attend and graduate college is the program's goal, the program's founder, hedge fund guru Whitney Tilson, said.

Mr. Tilson said the pay-for-performance model was a natural choice for him and his main financier, the investor William Ackman. "That's the business I'm in. That's the business Bill Ackman's in," he said. "We believe that aligning rewards with achievement is important. It works."

A similar program targeted at younger students and partially funded by Mayor Bloomberg was criticized over the summer as teaching the wrong values. A senior at Frederick Douglass, Derek Zimmerman, called that critique unfair. "I'd wonder what economic backgrounds those people are coming from," Mr. Zimmerman said.

When he won the school's $150 prize for scoring a 5 last year, he said, he spent the money at Barnes & Noble. "I splurged on Barron's books," he said, referring to the publisher of test preparation guides.