I previously proposed a thought experiment connected to this question: What does it mean to earn a high grade in a college course? The experiment went like this: Let’s assume we can straightforwardly measure both the quality of what students produce in a course—meaning their exam scores, papers, discussions, and/or whatever other assignments the instructor uses for assessment purposes—and the effort students put into those outputs. In turn, let’s use this gauge of quality and effort as a proxy for considering when students have legitimately earned a high grade or, by contrast, if grade inflation is occurring.
Working from this premise, I delineated a four-quadrant, quality/effort matrix:
The Quality/Effort Matrix
Most educators, I suggested, would agree that students in Quadrant Two have earned a high grade, both working hard on the course material and producing high-quality results. Conversely, most educators would agree that high grades in Quadrant Three, where students are neither working very hard nor producing high-quality results, would indicate clear evidence of grade inflation.
We might want students to be in Quadrant Two as often as possible, but we cannot expect all students to be there all the time. In fact, virtually every student will land outside Quadrant Two some of the time, and the majority will be in other quadrants much of the time. Given this reality, are students better off in Quadrant One, producing high-quality results without working hard, or Quadrant Four, working hard but struggling to produce high-quality results from that process? In which of those two quadrants can we make a persuasive case that students have earned an A? These are the questions I want to explore in this series.
Here I feature Quadrant One. As in the last post, I am (temporarily) presupposing that no students in this quadrant cheated, so what do I mean by producing high-quality outputs with low effort? If students complete the assignments themselves, they are obviously putting effort into the course. But I am less interested in the total amount of labor students direct toward assignments than in the cognitive friction they experience while completing those assignments. In doing the coursework, that is, how often do they find themselves in Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, that cognitive sweet spot where the work is neither too hard nor too difficult and where students extend their understanding and capability through a process of scaffolded learning?
I propose that when students are in Quadrant One, they don’t find the course material very challenging, so they rarely or perhaps never enter the ZPD. In a foreign language course, for example, maybe a student comes in with B2 language proficiency, but the course is designed for less advanced, A2 students (One might counter that the student “cheated” by intentionally taking a class below their level, but let’s be generous and assume that this was either an advising error or that the instructor—perhaps teaching this course for the first time—accidentally designed the course at a more rudimentary level than intended).
Alternatively, let’s say the student takes a course with a research paper as its capstone assignment. Contemporary writing teachers believe that students should undertake an iterative process of ideating, researching, writing, receiving and interpreting feedback, updating plans based on the feedback, revising, etc. That process is where productive struggle is meant to occur. If, instead, a student telescopes that process into a few hours the night before the paper is due (the classic “all-nighter”) and they still produce a paper that meets course standards for an A, they have largely avoided productive struggle.
We could go on, as with the student in a science course who obtains As on quizzes and exams with hardly any studying, maybe because the course happened to overlap significantly with a previous course they took, or maybe they just found the material easy to digest, or both…
My point is that in Quadrant One, even exempting academic dishonesty, cognitive friction largely does not apply. To be clear, I recognize that the intensity of struggle students must experience in order to enhance their knowledge and skills will vary from person to person, subject to subject, even course modality to course modality; the relationship between productive struggle and learning is not homogenous across students. But if students are performing well on assessments with minimal cognitive friction, surely something isn’t working as envisioned.
I imagine few educators would be happy about students (at best) going through the motions of a productive learning process, but I want to explore two plausible ways educators and educational pundits might respond to this question: Have students in Quadrant One earned high grades? The first response is to reject the question’s premise by, in effect, erasing Quadrant One from the quality/effort matrix.
We see reasoning along these lines in Adam Grant’s New York Times opinion piece, “No, you don’t get an A for effort,” (I have already expressed my disagreement with much of Grant’s essay—even as I admire other things he has written—but I lacked space to address all my concerns, so let’s have at it once more).
In arguing that effort alone does not justify high grades (thus incidentally making clear his perspective about Quadrant Four, where effort is high but quality is low), Grant indicates that high effort is a necessary but insufficient component of what it takes to create high quality. He offers a sports analogy:
There’s a reason we award Olympic medals to the athletes who swim the fastest, not the ones who train the hardest. What counts is not sheer effort but the progress and performance that result. Motivation is only one of multiple variables in the achievement equation. Ability, opportunity and luck count, too.
For Grant, “sheer effort” added to “ability, opportunity, and luck” comprise the “achievement equation.” Let’s pause a moment on that word achievement. For the purposes of our thought experiment, achievement can be thought of as a proxy for earning a high grade. (Sidebar: achievement is often used interchangeably with learning as well, essentially a dodge around the fact that we cannot directly measure learning).
Per Grant’s analogy, true achievement only occurs in Quadrant Two, where both quality and effort are high. And if we accept the premise that students simply cannot produce high-quality work without also putting in high effort, then we essentially need not worry about Quadrant One.
Crucially, however, Grant pitches his analogy at the most elite level of competition athletes can face, a level where everyone involved has already established themselves as world-class and where the margins between winning a gold medal and not even reaching the podium are measured in fractions of a second. Are we really to believe that collegiate expectations for achievement parallel with those of Olympic athletes, even at the nation’s most prestigious colleges?
On the contrary, in the vast majority of cases, receiving an A does not require Grant’s arithmetic; the collegiate “achievement equation” is more elementary, meaning that achievement equals quality alone. To put this another way: Maybe you can’t get an A for effort (in Quadrant Four), but yes, you can sometimes get an A without much effort (in Quadrant One).
To illustrate this point, let’s reorient Grant’s analogy toward an earlier time in the careers of these world-class athletes. It is overwhelmingly likely that, when starting out in their respective sports, some (and probably many) of these athletes could and did beat their competition without having to work very hard. This may have continued for some time until they reached a level where the competition better matched their abilities. In other words, they may have often landed in the athletics equivalent of Quadrant One.
Curiously, Grant seems to concede this simpler achievement equation in his concluding paragraph. He notes that students are “assessed on the quality of their written essays, class participation, group presentations and final papers or exams,” thus explicitly framing quality alone as the operative metric for a high grade. Grant likely wants us to assume that high effort, and thus a significant quantity of productive struggle, preceded that high quality, and maybe he has designed his courses in such a way that it is truly impossible to produce high quality without high effort, but effort itself is not being assessed, and it is not a requirement.
I don’t believe Quadrant One can simply be erased from the matrix. So, let’s turn to the second plausible response to Quadrant One, in which the combination of high quality and low effort is at worst a temporary inconvenience and at best a reason for optimism. To unpack this position, let’s extend the logic of our revised athletics analogy.
The argument goes like this: If students are producing high-quality deliverables without working hard (but also not cheating), this is a strong sign that they possess the ability and intelligence necessary to move up the academic ladder, where they will eventually be challenged. In other words, as with those gifted athletes early in their careers, Quadrant One is merely a pitstop on the road to Quadrant Two, where both quality and effort are high. What matters is that students “know this stuff,” and they are ready to move on.
One can extend this logic still further, arguing that students in Quadrant Four (where effort is high but the quality of student deliverables is relatively low) have little to show for their strong work ethic, which suggests they are underprepared or simply lack the intellectual capacity to achieve at this level. So, Quadrant One might not be ideal, but it is still better for students to be there than Quadrant Four.
To be clear, I absolutely believe some students end up in Quadrant One for “honest” reasons, not because they cheated or intentionally took an easy course. And I believe some students finish courses like these thinking, “Damn, that was a waste of time. I should take a more challenging class next semester,” even as many others would take their As with a grin, convinced they had gamed the system.
But the existence of “legit” Quadrant One students does not change the basic flaw in claiming that “well, if you look at it a certain way, it’s actually good if students are in Quadrant One!” Namely, our education system incentivizes students to spend as much time in Quadrant One as possible, whether or not cheating is involved. Quadrant One privileges product over the learning process at a time when, facing AI’s deep incursions into pedagogical spaces, we should be recognizing that in learning environments, the product only matters if and when the process matters.
In the posts ahead, I will argue that if we want students to work hard and create high-quality deliverables from that work (Quadrant Two), we must consistently invite them into learning spaces where they can work hard without necessarily producing high-quality deliverables (Quadrant Four). Sometimes this means conceding that it is OK to get an A for effort.
For this to happen, of course, our education system would have to value and operationalize productive struggle much more than it does now. As things stand, instead of inviting students into the quadrant that most prioritizes the learning process (Four), formal education consistently pushes students into the quadrant that most decenters the learning process (One); this is, in a nutshell, why our education system is so deeply flawed. And we haven’t even talked about cheating yet!