Today's NYT letters page features several responses to last week's story about college students' grade expectations. That story summarized recent studies suggesting that college students expect to be rewarded with higher grades for their effort, not necessarily the quality of the products they produce in class. As one undergraduate quoted in the article puts it, "If someone goes to every class and reads every chapter in the book and
does everything the teacher asks of them and more, then they should be
getting an A like their effort deserves."
It's easy to respond to a comment like this with eye-rolling and complaints about spoiled students, lack of standards, or the faults of a K-12 educational system where everyone "wins" but no one learns anything. My response is to ask a question: How, exactly, am I supposed to measure or evaluate a student's effort?
This is not a snarky or idle question. Let's really think about this for a moment. Setting aside for a moment the idea that effort may not be something we should measure or evaluate, if we were to measure it, how would we do so? How do I know concretely if a student is "making the effort" in class? I certainly can't follow each of them around to determine how much time she spent on the reading, how long he studied for the test, or whether he wrote the paper in one sitting or two. And even if I did so, I would not have any way of really ascertaining, objectively, how much work each of those tasks was for the individual student, how much effort was really required. Save popping in on them while they are working and asking them to rate their "perceived exertion" at that moment (something my cycling instructor likes us to do during class), I have no way to measure the student's effort on class work s/he does outside of class.
How else might we measure effort? How about in class? There is some evidence there: students who are obviously engaged with the material, participating, asking questions, pushing the discussion. But here, too, how much effort does this require? (For communication majors, "class participation" is like breathing). Surely, lots of my colleagues would suggest that traces of effort - perhaps substantial traces - are right there in the work the student produces: the tests, the papers, the quality of their class participation. In this view, professors implicitly recognize student effort by recognizing quality work. While the quality of the work and effort do not always correlate, it's probably fair to say that if a student "does everything the teacher asks of them and more," as our undergraduate above puts it, then s/he will probably do pretty well in class. And then everyone's happy.
But there remains the problem of the frequent disjuncture between the quality of the work as evaluated by the professor and the student's perception of her own effort. The latter is, as my social science
colleagues would call it, a self-report measure: illuminating, perhaps,
but not always the most robust assessment. It would seem that we are left with the very impasse the NYT article suggests: students expect that effort equals good grades, while professors blather on and on about product and quality. Short of berating them with the analogy that no matter how hard I train I will never run a sub-two-hour half marathon, how else to handle the moments of inevitable impasse?
My charitable hunch is that when students talk about "effort," they are really talking about process. I have noticed that in my courses which include a focus on process as well as product, students tend not to play the effort card. For example, in my rhetorical criticism course students write a final paper that is assembled in stages. At each stage, they do a required but ungraded draft and then a final, graded draft. Students get substantial feedback from me on their drafts, but that feedback doesn't initially come with a grade. Their perceived efforts on the draft are validated simply by my attention and feedback; when it comes time to attach a grade to my evaluation, they know that I know where they've been and where they are now. In short, they probably feel that something about their effort is visible to me, because they got my substantive attention before it "counted." This doesn't necessarily mean they are happy with my final assessment, of course, but if they do require further explanation for a grade the request tends not to be couched in the language of effort.
I teach the criticism course this way because a focus on process in this methods course forces - and I mean forces - the students to become better writers. They usually buy in because they see the benefits for themselves. As for my other courses, I sometimes use ungraded evaluation where it makes sense (e.g., paper drafts), though obviously this isn't always practical. Ultimately, it might be an interesting exercise to pose this question to students: If you believe that I should account for your effort in my evaluation of your performance in this class, how do you propose that I do so? I'd be curious to see what they come up with.