Grades for Effort a Disservice to Kids and Society

Below is a link to a Washington Post Article on the practices some teachers have for increasing grades based on a student's effort, supplementing or perhaps even replacing what the student gets for the actual achievement or fullfillment of the assignment. One teacher noted,

"Grades from assignments indirectly measure effort," he said. "I tell students that as long as they keep up with projects and homework and make an honest effort on tests and quizzes, they won't fail," he said.

But what if the child does not know or understand any of the material he or she is expected to know? Is not the point of an education to provide the skills and knowledge one needs to be a productive member of society? What happens on the necessary standardized tests that measure necessary knowledge? The testing board cannot measure effort on the exam. The result is likely to be a bunch of students with good grades for effort in class, but poor scores on the tests. So what is the best service to the child? To be sure, the ethic of working hard and following through on assignments is a valuable skill in life, but a child needs to learn something more.

Better grades for showing up and turning in homework, they said, keep students from doing what is necessary to master the material.

First, unless I am mistaken, children and their parents are under a legal obligation to be in school unless there is some valid and reasonable excuse. Thus, "showing up" should not be a graded criteria--it is a duty that must be fulfilled. Second, turning in homework is part of the assignment. I can prepare a report for a client, but unless I give that report to the client I have not fulfilled my duty to them. Similarly, a student shouldn't get credit for turning in graded homework--you have to turn it in to get the credit!!

I find it shocking that teachers feel that giving partial credit for even turning in the homework is necessary. If homework is part of the graded criteria for passage, the homework must be done. It really is as simple as that.

One teacher sums up my opinion well:

"One of life's tough lessons is trying hard and failing. It does no kid anywhere any good to give grades based on trying hard or behaving nicely because sooner or later they hit the wall of not having the knowledge the grade implied."

This is true. I have found in my experiences at the university and post-graduate world that many students' first failure in a graded exercise comes at these levels--usually on high stakes mid-term or final exams. At the upper levels of education, unlike high school, there is little personal connection between the professor/teaching assistant and the student. The college professor grades on mastery and understanding of the subject--something new to many students who used to get by on effort. Thus, students whose grades were inflated by grading for effort, fail in their mastery of the material, getting poor grades and not understanding why. The reason they fail to understand lies solely in the fact that their teachers and parents failed them. The adults in their life did not hold them accountable for learning what they were supposed to know, resulting in a failure as a young adult--for the first time.

In the end, what we are seeing in this debate about grading for effort is, itself, an extension of the debate about self-esteem among young people. By coddling these kids we have created a class of youth who do not know or understand failure as a natural course of events in education. They have no skills to assess the lessons of a failure and lack the ability to apply lessons learned in failure to avoid such failures in the future. Not learning the skill of analyzing failure or mistake in high school, means they lack to the ability to do so in college or the working world--a failure far greater in impact than anything a child is likely to suffer in school.


Where Some Give Credit, Others Say It's Not Due