What Grade 9 and A* Students Have in Common

The same quality turns up behind a grade 9 and behind four A*s — but it’s not quite the quality most people assume.

By the middle of an academic year, most students have met the obstacle. A test that went badly. A topic that will not yield however many times it’s read. The quiet recognition that they’re not where they expected to be by now. The obstacle is not the interesting part as everyone meets it. What is interesting is what happens in the weeks immediately afterwards and why two students who encountered the same obstacle end the year in different places.

Ask parents, teachers and students who have done well what the difference was and a version of the same answer comes back. Not ability. Something closer to staying power.

What grit actually is

The psychologist Angela Duckworth gave this quality its name, and studied it in settings designed to make people quit — military selection, national spelling competitions, teaching in difficult schools. Those who kept going weren’t reliably the most talented. They were the ones who stayed pointed in the same direction for longer.

At Better Life Tuition we define it more precisely, because the version that’s useful in a classroom has to be something a student can act on: grit is a student’s ability to sustain prolonged activity in a direction, in the face of adversity, in order to attain a long-term goal.

In the mentoring room, that resolves into three things a student needs at once. They are easy to name and harder to hold together.

Purpose

Very few students at GCSE or A-level can say what their studies are ultimately for and the honest uncertainty about it can be daunting. That’s normal, and not a problem to be solved in a week. But purpose tends to be built rather than discovered and it’s usually built out of the difficult parts. The meaning a student assigns to a disappointing result becomes, over time, the reason they keep going or the reason they stop. It’s worth being deliberate about the conclusions drawn at the low points because those conclusions do not stay private opinions. They become the plan.

Passion

I have not yet met a student with no passion. I’ve met a great many who could not see it and some who were genuinely struggling but almost every student has something they will talk about at length without being asked twice. The useful question is not what do you love but what will you go out of your way to learn about — through reading, through videos, through people who are better at it than you are. That willingness is the raw material. Grit is what happens when it gets pointed at something that lasts longer than a fortnight.

Persistence

This is the part that does the work and the part most often abandoned. A method adopted enthusiastically and dropped after three weeks has not been tested, it has only been sampled. Most revision strategies need longer than that to show anything, which means the student who changes their approach every fortnight is permanently running experiments that never conclude.

Every failure is a blessing in disguise, provided it teaches some great lessons one could not have learned without it.

Napoleon Hill

What it produces

When purpose, passion and persistence point the same way, three things tend to follow — and they compound.

Motivation becomes cheaper. Much of what students experience as laziness is the cost of pulling in two directions at once. When the reason for the work and the interest in the work agree, far less energy goes into the argument about whether to start.

Results follow the hours. Not because more hours appear but because the student begins to want the hours, and wanting them changes what happens inside them. Attention is the variable, not the duration.

Setbacks lose their weight. A student with a growth mindset reads a poor mark as information about a method. A student without one reads the same mark as information about themselves. This is the shift Carol Dweck’s work describes and it is the difference between a result that redirects effort and a result that ends it.

An honest note on the evidence

Grit has been popular enough for long enough to deserve some scrutiny, and it has received it. A large 2017 meta-analysis by Marcus Credé and colleagues, drawing on data from more than sixty thousand people, reached two conclusions worth knowing. Grit predicts academic performance but modestly. And it overlaps so heavily with conscientiousness — a trait psychologists have measured for decades — that it may not be a genuinely separate thing at all.

None of that is a reason to disregard what’s above. Perseverance still matters, and the habits described are worth building whatever we decide to call the underlying trait. However, perseverance is one input among several – alongside teaching, method, circumstances and a measure of luck, all of which shape how a student develops.

For students

Grit is not a personality you either have or lack. It behaves much more like a set of habits, and habits can be built deliberately.

• Find what you will go out of your way to learn. Not the subject you’re best at — the one you would still read about if it weren’t examined.
• Set goals that are specific and dated. “Work harder at Chemistry” cannot be started or finished. “Complete and mark two bonding questions every Tuesday until half term” can be both.
• Choose the harder task more often. The question you’re not sure you can answer teaches you more in twenty minutes than the chapter you already know teaches you in an hour.
• Keep a written record. A few lines after a study session on what worked and what didn’t turns scattered experience into something you can actually consult. It also slows the thinking down at the moments when it’s least accurate.
• Tell someone what you’re attempting. Family, a friend, a teacher, a mentor. Effort that nobody knows about is the easiest kind to abandon quietly.

For parents

Perseverance is difficult to instruct into existence. Asking a young person to want something more rarely produces wanting; it usually produces defensiveness because it sounds like a verdict on their character rather than a comment on their week.

What does seem to help is protecting the conditions. A student who has one reliable, unremarkable slot in the week is far more likely to keep going than one negotiating the question fresh each day. And when a result disappoints, the first conversation matters more than its content. “What did that show you?” opens a door. “What does that say about you?” closes one, whatever the tone of voice.

One more thing worth watching: a student who quietly changes method every fortnight is not being inconsistent so much as anxious. They’re looking for the approach that will feel comfortable and the approaches that build marks rarely do. Naming that gently is more useful than adding hours.

The people who are afraid to go through the challenge are the ones who stay stuck in their lives.

Dean Graziosi

Before you go

Forcing your way angrily through an academic year achieves very little except exhaustion. The students who arrive at a grade 9 or an A* are almost never the ones who pushed hardest on any single day. They’re the ones who found an approach that cost them less to repeat, and then repeated it long after it stopped being interesting.

So the question for this term isn’t whether your child is working hard enough. It’s whether the thing they’re doing is something they could still be doing in March.