Here is the post I saw:

Hi Janice,

Yes, posts/users are automatically awarded these badges once they cross the required vote thresholds. Unfortunately, there are some posts that are not deserving of these badges that do end up receiving them because they gathered enough upvotes.

Currently the best way to combat this is to continue flagging/reporting posts that are low quality, solicit votes, or otherwise violate our guidelines. Posts that are deleted by our Guardians won't receive votes and thus won't be able to earn any badges.

Thanks for all you do!

I don't care about the badges.  I care that a 6th grader looking at the Top Voted Questions for that video might think that someone at Khan Academy made the decision to give that Answer those awards.  

I guess your advice is to flag such posts as low quality.  I wish there were fewer low quality posts, so the Guardians had time to get through the reports - I keep seeing several posts in 6th grade math that I flagged over 9 days ago.