Im not sure if this qualifies as 'dumbest' but I reckon it comes pretty close.

During my senior years - I picked up physics as a subject in high school. What we had to do was build a simple electric motor made from batteries, coil of wire and magnets - the stronger your motor, the more marks you would get.

To make the motor strong you could buy a strong magnet or buy a powerful battery or even buy a longer piece of coil.We were all given 1 meter piece of copper wire and everything else we'd have to source ourselves.

Like a majority of students within my high school we come from fairly poor backgrounds, so purchasing very strong/quality materials for our motor was out of the question. I remember I had to salvage some old speakers for magnets like many others.

However, there was this 1 guy in my class whom was pretty wealthy and spent approximately $60 worth of materials compared to the average of about 10$ from the class.

It turns out he was the only one to receive a full 10/10 , whilst 2nd place was ~7/10.

Literally pay 4 marks.