This is a punishment? He gets to tell the world what he thought of his teacher and also proclaim his rebellious nature. It's a 5th grader's dream come true, and it looks like he's suppressing a smile. I'm surprised the other students aren't rushing to stand beside him with their own signs saying much worse.
I believe what you're seeing tested empirically in figures 2 and 5 of that paper is this ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem#Cardinal_payoff_variant
For that problem, the optimal skip pool, given N candidates, is sqrt(N): http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jmp.2005.11.003
I believe what you're seeing tested empirically in figures 2 and 5 of that paper is this ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem#Cardinal_payoff_variant
For that problem, the optimal skip pool, given N candidates, is sqrt(N):
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jmp.2005.11.003
So for N=100, it's 10, and for N=1000, it's ~32.