Last year, while serving on the Teaching Evaluation Committee at the business school where I work, I asked a professorship candidate after his teaching demonstration how he took effort into account when assessing student learning. After a thoughtful pause, he replied with a counterquestion: “Is it fair to reward effort?”  

 

His response wasn’t surprising. After all, assessment practices in educational institutions typically tend to prioritise performance over process. Nevertheless, I still found myself somewhat taken aback by his answer. Partly this was because I recognise effort as an essential component of the growth mindset that informs my own teaching. More importantly, each year I encounter students who feel that their grades do not fully reflect the effort they have invested in their learning.  Curious about how students themselves understand effort, I conducted a small survey throughout the academic year of 2025-2026. With the assistance of my colleagues, 234 students responded to three questions:  

 

i) How do you define effort?

ii) What kind of effort have you put into this course  

iii) What colour do you associate with effort?  

 

The first question explored how students conceptualise effort, the second how they experience it in their own learning, and the third invited a more intuitive response. The first two elicited largely verbal descriptions, while the colour associations offered a different way of expressing what effort might feel like.

 

What effort looks like to students  

                                                                                                 

Although the responses varied considerably, some broad understandings of effort emerged. The first understanding reflected what I came to think of as a growth orientation. Students described effort as something that contributes to learning, positive outcomes and development (e.g., When I put in effort something good comes out of it.). The second understanding centred on sustained engagement. Here, effort was seen as disciplined use of personal resources such as concentration and persistence (e.g., Effort means I’m trying consistently.) The third understanding underscored personal meaning. Rather than emphasising outcomes or specific behaviours, these students described effort as an ongoing process of aligning their motivation, perseverance and values. In this view, effort wasn’t something one invested but something one experienced as personally significant (e.g., Effort is a combination of things that come from the heart.).  

 

When effort has a colour

 

When asked to describe effort, students defined what it is. When asked to give it a colour, they described what effort feels like. To generalise, green was commonly asssociated with growth (e.g., Green represents growth and a positive final outcome.), blue with calmness (e.g., A calm and bright colour that means trying consistently), and red, orange or yellow with grit (e.g., Red represents hard work for me.).  Perhaps more revealingly, many students didn't settle for a single colour. Instead, they referred to combinations of colour, suggesting that effort cannot be reduced to one single representation (e.g., Colours mixed in the right way for me.). Although the sample size is respectable, I’m reluctant to  attach any universal meaning to the colours themselves. Their significance lies instead in the metaphors students used to make visible something that is difficult to capture through conventional assessment measures. My interpretation is that what students were conveying is that effort isn’t something that they simply do; it’s also something they experience internally.  

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One further observation

 

One additional pattern reinforces these interpretations. When reporting on the effort they had invested in the course, i.e., the context in which they responded to the survey, students described their effort primarily through observable actions, such as attending classes, participating in discussions and submitting assignments by deadlines. At the same time, relatively few connected effort to the amount of time spent studying. Instead, their responses consistently emphasised the quality of their engagement – concentrating, persisting and remaining committed to their individual learning process. I would argue that this suggests that students understand effort as something that originates within them, but only becomes noticeable in the way in which they engage with learning. In this sense, effort appears to function as an internal compass, giving direction to the learning process. This may help explain why so many students feel frustrated  when their effort - both as action and as an inner learning experience - is not fully reflected in their assesssment.  

 

What students may really be saying

 

Reflecting on these findings, I have come to think that effort may function as a proxy for something larger. On closer inspection, what students describe as effort often appears to be a form of engagement, and beneath that engagement lies a sense of agency – a recognition that learning requires something from them. In the business school where I work, there is frequent discussion about the need for students to take responsibility for their learning. Based on this survey, it would seem that many of our students already understand - and act on - this responsibility.  

 

The challenge, perhaps, isn't that students fail to engage with learning, but that we often fail to recognise their engagement because it doesn't neatly align with the performance indicators through which educational success is measured. This may point to one of the central tensions within contemporary higher education. Assessment systems are designed to compare outcomes across large numbers of students, while learning itself is experienced by individuals, each following their own trajectory of development.  

 

This brings me back to the original question of fairness and what we value in students and studying. If we expect students to be active participants in their own learning, the educational dilemma is not simply whether effort should be rewarded, but whether our assessment systems adequately recognise the forms of engagement through which learning occurs. This doesn't mean abandoning standards or replacing achievement with effort. Rather, it means acknowledging that education isn't simply the production of measurable outcomes but a relationship with the self in which students actively participate in becoming. This resonates with Krpan’s (2026) call for a “truly human psychology” that takes subjective experience, introspection and meaning seriously - precisely the dimensions of learning that are difficult to reduce to standardised measures. 

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This may be one of the obstacles facing higher education in the years ahead. In a world where knowledge is increasingly accessible, abundant and perhaps even becoming redundant, the value of education may lie less in what students know than in recognising the distinctly human processes through which they can learn, create meaning and evolve as individuals. This perspective also seems particularly relevant at a time when perfectionism among students is increasing, with growing concerns about mistakes and doubts about their own actions (Curran, Hill & Pose, 2026). In this sense, students’ descriptions of effort invite us to look beyond performance alone and pay closer attention to these procesess through which learning takes place.

 

Personally, I am beginning to lean towards the thought that maybe it's time for us, as educators and higher education institutions, to recognise that we can learn something about learning from our students – and that this learning of ours may require something from us.

 

 

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References

 

Curran, T., Hill, A. and Pose, P. (2026). Perfectionism is accelaring over time: A cross-temporal analytic review of 35 years of college student data. Psychological Bulletin. 152(3): 255-287

 

Krpan, D. (2026). From nexus to the tower of Babel: On truly human psychology in the dawn of AI. Review of General Psychology. 0(0):1-23.