failing like never before

There are numerous schools that use stocksquest.com, an online stock market simulation, as a teaching tool. The point of the simulation is to mimic perfectly the real stock market, the only exception being the use of fake money. Real stocks can be bought and sold at real market prices, and students can perform market research and read news articles in order to help their performance in the simulation, just like in real life (theres a lot of "real" here for a simulation) The point of course, is to show students how the stock market functions and how to make money in a relatively easy manner. Stocksquest even adds a little extra fun in, allowing teachers to create class or school wide competitions so that students can battle each other out for financial success. My high school economics class engaged in a stocksquest competition, and you can see the final class rankings here. As you can see, a few students ended the contest with ridiculously huge amounts of money. While most of the class had made or lost between 15% of their money, there were a few that ended with unrealisticly huge percent gains. Once would of course assume that these students cheated. Although in this case, cheating is rather a strong word, especially since the system invites it.

There are other online stock market simulations available, some of them as free as stocksquest, and I would highly encourage teachers to sample other sites before selecting stocksquest for use in the class room. Hopefully, some of the flaws of stocksquest that I will investigate later in this article will be evidence enough to convince teachers to select a different simulation.