The effect of effort grading on learning

In the fall of 2004, Benedict College – a Historically Black College in Columbia, SC – began enforcing a new grading policy called Success Equals Effort (SE2). Under this policy, students taking freshman and sophomore level courses were assigned grades that explicitly rewarded not only content learning (“knowledge” grade) but also measures of effort (“effort” grade). This paper examines the effects of effort grading using two stage least squares and fixed effect estimates. I find evidence of a strong positive correlation between “effort” grades and “knowledge” grades. Under some restrictions this relationship can be interpreted as “effort” producing “knowledge”.