What kinds of grades do you generally get in your classes? Are you satisfied with them? Do you think your marks have been accurate reflections of your learning?
What do you think teachers should base student grades on: effort, ability, class participation, personal growth, work habits, final papers and exams, achievement, comparison to peers or something else?
In “No, You Don’t Get an A for Effort,” Adam Grant writes about why he believes grades should be about excellence — and why students have come to mistakenly expect to be rewarded for their hard work instead:
After 20 years of teaching, I thought I’d heard every argument in the book from students who wanted a better grade. But recently, at the end of a weeklong course with a light workload, multiple students had a new complaint: “My grade doesn’t reflect the effort I put into this course.”
High marks are for excellence, not grit. In the past, students understood that hard work was not sufficient; an A required great work. Yet today, many students expect to be rewarded for the quantity of their effort rather than the quality of their knowledge. In surveys, two-thirds of college students say that “trying hard” should be a factor in their grades, and a third think they should get at least a B just for showing up at (most) classes.
This isn’t Gen Z’s fault. It’s the result of a misunderstanding about one of the most popular educational theories.
More than a generation ago, the psychologist Carol Dweck published groundbreaking experiments that changed how many parents and teachers talk to kids. Praising kids for their abilities undermined their resilience, making them more likely to get discouraged or give up when they encountered setbacks. They developed what came to be known as a fixed mind-set: They thought that success depended on innate talent and that they didn’t have the right stuff. To persist and learn in the face of challenges, kids needed to believe that skills are malleable. And the best way to nurture this growth mind-set was to shift from praising intelligence to praising effort.
The idea of lauding persistence quickly made its way into viral articles, best-selling books and popular TED talks. It resonated with the Protestant work ethic and reinforced the American dream that with hard work, anyone could achieve success.
Psychologists have long found that rewarding effort cultivates a strong work ethic and reinforces learning. That’s especially important in a world that often favors naturals over strivers — and for students who weren’t born into comfort or don’t have a record of achievement. (And it’s far preferable to the other corrective: participation trophy culture, which celebrates kids for just showing up.)
The problem is that we’ve taken the practice of celebrating industriousness too far. We’ve gone from commending effort to treating it as an end in itself. We’ve taught a generation of kids that their worth is defined primarily by their work ethic. We’ve failed to remind them that working hard doesn’t guarantee doing a good job (let alone being a good person). And that does students a disservice.
The essay concludes:
Teachers and parents owe kids a more balanced message. There’s a reason we award Olympic medals to the athletes who swim the fastest, not the ones who train the hardest. What counts is not sheer effort but the progress and performance that result. Motivation is only one of multiple variables in the achievement equation. Ability, opportunity and luck count, too. Yes, you can get better at anything, but you can’t be great at everything.
The ideal response to a disappointing grade is not to complain that your diligence wasn’t rewarded. It’s to ask how you could have gotten a better return on your investment. Trying harder isn’t always the answer. Sometimes it’s working smarter, and other times it’s working on something else altogether.
Every teacher should be rooting for students to succeed. In my classes, students are assessed on the quality of their written essays, class participation, group presentations and final papers or exams. I make it clear that my goal is to give as many A’s as possible. But they’re not granted for effort itself; they’re earned through mastery of the material. The true measure of learning is not the time and energy you put in. It’s the knowledge and skills you take out.
Students, read the entire essay and then tell us:
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What do you think student grades should be based on? How much, if at all, should effort and hard work factor in?
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How important are grades to you? Do they motivate you to learn more or to work harder? If not, what other indicators or incentives might push you to be more successful in school?
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Does your school have a consistent grading policy, or does each teacher use their own system? Are the grading criteria clear and transparent to all students, or does it sometimes feel as if the grading is random or mysterious?
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Mr. Grant argues that A’s are for excellence, not for effort, writing: “The true measure of learning is not the time and energy you put in. It’s the knowledge and skills you take out.” Do you agree? How persuasive is his argument?
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Mr. Grant notes that he is seeing a growing number of students complain, “My grade doesn’t reflect the effort I put into the course.” Does that observation resonate with your own experiences? Have you ever complained to a teacher about a grade? Why? Did your efforts result in a grade change?
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What recommendations would you give your school to improve its grading system? What do you think your teachers need to understand about the expectations, motivations and learning of teenagers today?