[Splines]

> I have been told that praising a kid for effort vs. results is much more important.

And yet, our work is completely the opposite. Your boss doesn't care how much effort it took you to do that thing, only that it got done.

Parents inevitably take this approach at home as well. An A is an A is an A. Good marks are what we look for, and are a mental shortcut to know if your child is doing their work at school. But we see this can backfire, as children learn that getting all the answers right on a test are all that matters. Maybe instead our school system needs to instead evaluate relative performance, not absolute performance. A grade should say "Sally improved by 50% this term", and parents can praise that result. The tests that a child takes should adjust to take into account that child's proficiency, to ensure that child is always being challenged.

Aside: Getting all the answers right on a test is also a poor signal - you're essentially clipping the measurement of a child's performance. Kids should be used to failure, and learning how to take on new challenges. Why not give a test where the expected mark is 50%?

[ThrustVectoring]

>Your boss doesn't care how much effort it took you to do that thing, only that it got done.

Err, that's not quite true, since your boss is an agent of the company and not the company itself. Your boss has to look good to his boss and "manage up", and looking like you're putting in effort is important for that.

[Balgair]

Yeah, many open-plan/cubicle filled places have moved past the product and towards visible effort. I can't count how many stories I've read on HN about how the quiet hard working coder was passed over for a raise in favor of the dumb but verbose coder. Heck, even the founders just need to look good, as is also a common complaint on HN about companies that are all jazz and no drums.

[darkengine]

Measuring improvement is even easier to cheat. One merely has to purposefully give wrong answers in the early parts of the class, and then answer more earnestly in the latter half of the class.

[Splines]

You'd need to have continuous tracking of performance across grades. Low performance at the beginning of a school year would translate to a drop in progress compared to the end of the previous year.

You could still game it by aiming for the average, but really the average is the expectation. And in a world where subject matter difficulty can scale with a child irrespective of the skill level of peers their age, getting an average result on a test is ok.

[CptJamesCook]

Boss here. I care a lot about how hard an employee is working.

[Splines]

Perhaps I was too harsh with my words. You do care, but would you rewards hard work in and of itself? Results are important - and to be fair sometimes you can't get the results you want and failure is ok and should be expected. That's a result too.