Exploration of Academic Risk Taking Among College Students

Abstract

This article presents and experimentally tests a new method for measuring student risk preferences where monetary outcomes are not directly involved. The authors call this new method the Lazy Professor Risk Task (LPRT). This article compares the LPRT's results to popular conventional methods where monetary outcomes are involved. The results show that the new method is capable of producing consistent responses at approximately the same rate as comparable conventional methods. In addition, the method produced responses that were no noisier than conventional methods. It is hoped that future research can perfect this new method and use it to compare classroom risk taking to risk taking in other domains.