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Someone with a growth mindset thinks, “no matter how long it takes or how hard it is, I will learn what I want or need to learn.” Many school practices, however, interfere with this mindset by penalizing students for taking longer to learn something. Students who pass a course in ten months are considered successful. Students who go to summer school (take twelve months to learn it) are considered to have failed with the added consequence of losing their summer break.

All of this happens despite that fact that there is no research indicating that people learn in ten months segments of time. Research reveals just the opposite: people naturally take different amounts of time to learn things and learn best when they are not evaluated, nor penalized on the length of time it takes to learn them.

For example, if the goal and purpose of school was success for all students, a strong case, as Dweck has suggested, could be made for only having two grades: Mastery and Not Yet. All the resources and efforts of educators should be directed towards helping students persist until they learned what they needed or wanted to learn. School improvement efforts should focus on changing school practices so that students can believe that their efforts will lead to success rather than failure defined by time limits.