It’s the perception of teachers’ view of effort. But… isn’t the goal of the examination system, just the marks themselves, and studying can be done alone, and usually in a place the teacher won’t be able to see. So they are just a biased perception of students’ “efforts”. In fact, it might be a stupid idea to “never give up!” when in fact employers don’t really care about something that the majority of people are actually forced to do well, handing in homework on time and such… Output is more important than input.