Talk:Energy Point Leaderboard/@comment-25304012-20140911195719/@comment-3388158-20140912054124

A guardian at KA approached me and indicated that some people had complained about the rate this account (avdn2) was accumulating points, feeling it devaluated their own efforts.

With the avnd2 account, I wanted to show that energy points (EP) currently are not an indication at all, of learning effort. Some people do points management to gather EP, others click on buttons for exerises (in the making) that require no answer at all, still others do simple exercises on end. All of that has more to do with wasting time then with learning. Since I am lazy, I wrote a program to do a simple exercise for me (if I had not been so lazy, I could probably have had it do points management as well, for an even faster EP gain). I think I have proven my point: that you can gather points at KA without learning anything, especially as the account had less than one badge per million points gained.

I pointed out, to the guardian, where I think the weaknesses are in the system. There will always be a fastest way to gather EP, but in my opinion this should be more closely related to what can be considered real learning effort. Among things, I proposed to decrease the EP gained for repeated exercises, and to do away with the points for finishing a row beyond some number of exercises. This independent of wheter the exercises were correctly or incorrectly answered. I also proposed to review already gained EP according to the previous measure as well as all of those EP gained through pre-release staging areas (that would set me back to 0 on avnd2 and to about 20mln on my avdn account).

I hope KA can find the time to implement these, or some other measures, before others start finding and using these exploitable areas. Approaching account owners that are gaining points fast is IMHO not a correct, nor a sustainable effort for KA.