No, you don't get an "A" for effort.
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(clicking on the link will take you to the whole - unlocked - article)
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.
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Can't reply without it sounding like a brag, but whatever. I got my MBA a few years ago but during the program, there was one specific class where the professor started the first class saying he "never gives an A, even if you do all the work perfectly" and also that he spoke 6 languages, LOL. It was such a weird first class I almost wrote to the Dean complaining that a professor told us on Day 1 that we can't get an A in his class.
Why this was important to me...? I did really well in high school, but had a reality check as a freshman in college that skipping classes = bad grades, and so I had a bad GPA to start (a 1.8?) and worked it back to a decent one (3.2?) by the time I graduated. And when I pursued the MBA I wanted to really see if I could get a 4.0 GPA if I worked hard (effort AND result btw), and this professor risked it.
Anyway, I ended up getting an A in the class which resulted in me being the only graduate (out of 380 MBA grads!) to have a 4.0 GPA. Got a special award and all. Not sure if it was a psychological move or what, but there you go. My best friend in the program got a B+ in that dude's class, so he ended up with a 3.95 or something...
