College Students' Ratings of Student Effort, Student Ability and Teacher Input as Correlates of Student Performance on Multiple-choice Exams

In the class session following feedback regarding their scores on multiple-choice exams, undergraduate students in a large human development course rated the strength of possible contributors to their exam performance. Students rated items related to their personal effort in preparing for the exam (identified as student effort in the paper), their ability to perform well on the exams (identified as student ability), and teacher input that might have affected their exam performance. Students rated most student effort items higher than teacher input and student ability items. Notwithstanding, across all exams, ratings of student ability and teacher input correlated more strongly with exam performance than did student effort ratings. High and low performers on the exams differed significantly on ratings of student ability and teacher input, but were more similar on ratings of student effort.