$300 FROM LENDING CLUB: Maximizing Money has uncovered some good deals from the Lending Club: you can get up to $300 for opening a new account. Note that funds must be fully invested within 45 days. Opening bonuses are as follows:
$2,500 –> $100 bonus
$5,000 –> $200 bonus
$10,000 –> $300 bonus
That’s 3-4% on top of whatever interest you can earn from Lending Club, so it’s a nice margin of error if you’ve been curious about trying out peer-to-peer lending.
GAMING THE SAT: Here’s another great story from Quora on how a student figured out a loophole in the way the ETS reports SAT scores to college that let him take the test as many times as he wanted… but colleges only saw the scores he wanted them to see.
To understand this hack, you have to realize there is a certain amount of randomness in standardized testing. Scores by any group of people–or by an individual repeating the test over and over–will tend to sort themselves in the shape of a bell curve. If you take the SAT over and over, most of your scores will tend to fall in the thick part of the curve, the “Somewhat” section on the graph below.
Whether that “Somewhat” is closer to 1600 or to 400 depends on the student, but the point is that no matter how good or bad you are at the test itself, there is variation in the results. Ideally, you’ll have a great test and fall into the “Extremely” section on the right hand of the curve. If you take the test once, it’s unlikely. If you take the test enough times, though, it’s very likely to happen.
The problem is that colleges know if you’re taking the test multiple times and they can just average the scores together–unless, like Kai Peter Chang, you figure out the system.
Chang realized that the ETS was using social security numbers to track applicants, so on every test he deliberately wrote one digit of his SSN incorrectly. He took the test several times. When he finally got the result he wanted, he called them up and asked them to change the social security number for the good test result.
Result: success! As far as the colleges knew, he scored a 1510 on his SAT the one time he took it.
Whether or not this is ethical we leave up to you, but regardless of that we can still admire the ingenuity of the hack.
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