Grit, perseverance and how it affects academic success.

Team members : Robin Joseph, Kiran Mathew Koshy, Siddharth Singh

This study is on how students perceive themselves as perseverant. It also tells us to what degree students rate themselves on this particular attribute. This psycho-analysis gauges as to how much grit and perseverance affects academic success.

Perseverance is an important part of academic success as it helps one stay focused on their academic goals and forego distractions. Delayed gratification, self discipline are all based on perseverance of the individual. Grit can be described as perseverance and passion for long term goals. Delayed gratification and self discipline are more related to short term goals.

Some earlier studies on the topic 

Grit: perseverance and passion for long-term goals, Duckworth AL et al. The findings of this paper suggest that achievement of difficult goals entails not only talent but also sustained and focused application of it over time. Tough et al reviews Duckworth's work and label grit as essential to achievement. Finally . Shoda, Mischel and Peake, 1990 attributed self discipline to higher SAT scores

A survey was conducted in which students were asked to answer questions on self discipline and perseverance. Anonymity was provided so that relatively honest answers could be expected. We received close to forty respondents with varying responses. 

The main limitation of our survey is that it expects the person who takes the survey to be honest and also be able gauge himself to a reasonable level.We do not have any reasonable proof to believe that the self assessment of a person is accurate. Also the responses that are given as options are not objective but may vary from person to person. Another main limitation is that mentally healthy human beings like to think of themselves as having positive qualities and consider themselves to be good people. This is in line with the observation that more than 50 percentage of the population thinks of themselves as better than 50 percentage of the population. This innate positivity bias is the biggest problem that we faced. For example we got overwhelmingly positive responses to the question 'I consider myself to be diligent' . Such a high score on the trait might not mean the person actually possess it but they see it  as a positive trait and want to see it in themselves.

Results.

Most of the respondents said setbacks do not discourage them and that they are hard workers.

An interesting observation here is that a lot of the respondents lose interest in topics after some time. Many of them also responded that their interests change from year to year. 

The short attention span is also visible in the response to the difficulty faced for completing lengthy projects.

Although their focus waivers during long term projects most of the respondents claim to be able to finish their work.

The survey observed that almost all the respondents claim to be hard workers and are not discouraged by setbacks. One way to look at this is that the responses can be considered genuine since all the respondents can be considered to be academically successful. Another way to look at this observation is that it confirms the strong presence of innate positivity bias that mentally healthy human beings exhibit. That the subjective nature of the survey affects the respondents can be seen in the fact that most of the responses have been middle ground responses like ‘Somewhat like me’ ‘mostly like me ‘etc. Thus we were able to conclude that grit and perseverance contribute strongly to academic success. Also the positivity bias should be taken into account for all such surveys.