Teachers’ salaries should be based on their students’ academic performance.

As the society develops faster, the competition becomes more and more intense, which can be noticed even among students. Intending to bring out the best in the next generations, some schools make new policy: setting the teachers’ salaries based on their students’ academic performance, aiming at making their students more informed. Teachers can be encouraged to improve their students’ grades, but their salaries cannot only be based on students’ scores. This method only concerns the problem superficially and it will cause more serious problems.

At the first glance, it may be helpful to improve students’ study if teachers’ salaries are based on their students’ academic performance. Teachers, who want to get more payments, may come up with more ideas and put more efforts in teaching, trying to improve their students’ scores. Admittedly, this indeed gives more incentives to teachers to work harder and can raise students’ grades in a short term. However, this method can pose certain problems unconsciously and severely, which will outweigh the benefit.

Firstly, it is very easy to turn teachers only care about students’ grades. They may distribute as much exercise as they can to students. In an extreme case, they may only teach and review the contents which would be tested in exams, ignoring the rest which would not show up in exams. In this situation, students are treated as study machines, being crammed with exercise and solving problems again and again until they can memorize the solutions. Also, exams are treated as the objectives of study, which is against the meaning of exams that is the means to test the achievement of study. Moreover, this is even against the spirit of study, which is enlightening students, not constraining students with only exercises and exams.

Secondly and simultaneously, with more and more exercise and more and more importance of grades emphasized by teachers, which are related to their salaries, it is easier for students to have physical and psychical health problems. More exercise might even occupy students’ spare time, leaving them no time to work out. Teachers might play favorites with students with high grades and be mean to students with low grades. For severe cases, the pressure to perform may be so high that results in stigmatization of intellectually deficient students or even suicide as consequence of low scores.

What’s more, it may induce students to engage in fraud in exams in order to get better results. The more emphasis on grades and more respect showed to high grade students by teachers, would send a misleading message to young students, whose judgement is not mature, respecting to their moral values, that only students with high grades can be called good students. Students may do anything, including cheating in exams, to get good grades and become the so-called good students.

The above potential problems are scaring and not inevitably as long as the teachers’ salaries are exclusively based on their students’ academic results. It is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it can encourage teachers to be more responsible to students’ study. On the other hand, it may cause serious problems in extreme cases. Setting a limited portion of a teacher’s payment related to students’ scores would be incentive. However, a good teacher got high payments should be evaluated by his capacities to inspire students, cultivate students in a healthy atmosphere and imbue students with right values.