Grading Effort: Unintended Consequences

There are so many issues with grading. A teacher's entire slate of professional developlment could be spent discussing and investigating how to properly tinker with their grading practices. Inevitably, teachers end up talking at some point about effort, and whether we should be grading effort, and if so, how do we grade effort (notice the question is never should we be grading at all).

I have some serious issues with grading at all, but if you do feel the need to grade, it is important to remember the unintended consequences of grading a student's effort.

Think about these situations:

Johnny works his tail off on a social studies project, but in the end, his project really wasn't that good. Despite the lack of a final product, Johnny actually ended up learning a lot from his mistakes, but not soon enough, as the due date demanded he turn his project in. The teacher ends up failing Johnny on the content portions of the scoring rubric, but recognizes Johnny's effort and gives him a very high grade for his effort.

The teacher does this because we think it will bode well for the future. We want Johnny to keep working hard because we believe that his perseverance will pay off. However, what if that isn't the message he receives? He might say:

Even when I try really hard, I'm still dumb.

This situation may be more serious than you first comprehend. I've written about Bernard Weiner's research before on how important it is that children value their effort as an important factor in their intelligence. A child who is graded highly for their effort but poorly on their intelligence and skills may ultimately come to see external factors as being more influential on their learning. We don't want this.

Carol lollygags her way through another math assignment, placing little to no effort in her learning. Despite her lack of effort, Carol follows the instructions and produces what the teacher wants. The teacher marks Carol very well on her content and (wrongly) assumes she must have placed a ton of effort into doing so well on this project.

My fear here is that Carol knows far better than her teacher how little effort she truly put into her learning, and that Carol recieves a message that sounds something like this:

I can do really well even when I don't try.

Grading effort is a precarious endeavor that teachers need to think long and hard about before passing judgement on something so intangible. We would be wise to remember that we may have more to lose than we have to gain when it comes to grading effort.

Why am I smart

There is a strong line of research that shows us that how people perceive their intelligence or success may be more important than whether they are intelligent or successful.
Let’s pretend little Sally did a ‘good job’. How might Sally explain her success? Here are a number of reasonable responses Little Sally might give:

•‘I worked my tail off for that project.’
•‘I’m just a natural at this stuff.’
•‘I guessed on like half the questions.’
•‘It was really easy.’

Let’s categorize these responses:

•Which are internal factors and which are external?
•Which are stable and which change over time?
•Which are in Sally’s control?


Attempting to identify how little Sally attributes her success or failure in this manner was developed by Bernard Weiner and it has proven to have some striking implications. Take a look at Sally’s responses again. Which response would you rather her attribute her success to? Sally might attribute her success to factors that are external (luck and difficulty), factors that are stable (ability and difficulty) or factors that are out of her control (luck, difficulty and ability). Most parents and teachers that I know would want Sally to attribute her success to effort because it provides a lot of optimism for future growth. The problem arises when we praise kids in a way that encourages them to focus on how well they are doing.

Alfie Kohn points out “When kids are led to focus on how well they are performing in school, they tend to explain their performance not by how hard they tried but by how smart they are.” This means kids are very likely to attribute their successes and failures to factors such as luck, difficulty and ability before effort. That is to say, they are likely to attribute their successes and failures to factors that are external, strictly stable and out of their control. Carol Dweck would describe anyone who attributes their successes and failures in this way as suffering from a fixed mindset.

There is a big difference between focusing on showing how good you are and focusing on showing how bad you’re not. And it might be worth reflecting on how much time we should even spend focusing on showing how good we are, when we could be spending our time learning and improving.