The 2010 McGill Goal-Writing Study: What 85 Students on Probation Actually Did

The students in the 2010 McGill study were already in trouble. All 85 were struggling academically, and they were randomly sorted into two groups. Half completed an intensive online program in which they wrote about their goals. The other half did a control task built to look like an intervention. Four months later, the writing group had a mean GPA of 2.91 on McGill’s 4.0 scale, against 2.46 for the control group, and every student in the goal group was still carrying a full course load while 20% of the control group had dropped below full-time status.

The paper is Morisano, Hirsh, Peterson, Pihl and Shore, “Setting, Elaborating, and Reflecting on Personal Goals Improves Academic Performance,” Journal of Applied Psychology, 2010. The title is a three-step recipe, and the middle verb, elaborating, is the easiest one to lose when the result gets retold as “writing goals works.”

What did the students actually write?

The program asked them to picture a desired future three to five years out and plan toward it. That is a long way from jotting “get a 3.0” on a sticky note. Setting a goal was the first step; the title names elaborating it (spelling out what it involves) and reflecting on it as the other two. The sample is small (about 42 per group), the follow-up is four months, and it is one campus, so treat the GPA gap as a strong early result rather than a law.

The pattern fits a larger body of work on how a vague intention differs from a detailed one. In their 2006 meta-analysis of 94 tests, Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran found that people who attached an if-then plan to a goal were more likely to follow through, with an average effect size of d = 0.65, which is a medium-to-large effect in psychology terms. The long-form version of that evidence is in the if-then research. Gabriele Oettingen’s contrasting work adds the missing half: imagining the obstacle, not only the win. It has its own post under mental contrasting.

Does writing goals down work for everyone?

No, and the clearest counterweight is a large null result. Dobronyi, Oreopoulos and Petronijevic (2019) randomized about 1,400 first-year students at a big Canadian university to online goal-setting exercises, some with follow-up reminders by email or text. They found no evidence of an effect on GPA, credits or second-year persistence. Schippers and colleagues’ 2020 randomized trial with 1,134 students went the other way (detail in the FAQ below).

One reading of that split is that the exercise helps people who have a gap to close, like the McGill students on probation, and does less for students who were already fine. That is a hypothesis; the studies do not test it directly. What they do show is that “write your goals down” is not a single treatment. The McGill program was long, structured and aimed at a specific population.

Where does the “3% who wrote goals” story come from?

From a study that nobody can find. The tale says Yale’s Class of 1953 (or, in another version, Harvard’s MBA class of 1979) was surveyed, and the 3% with written goals ended up richer than the other 97% combined. Fast Company’s December 1996/January 1997 issue ran a piece reporting that Yale had no record of any such survey, and the Class of 1953 secretary had never heard of it. Nobody has produced a Harvard version either. The Yale version also turns up in a post about a fake 95% accountability figure.

The McGill paper is real, randomized and peer-reviewed. It is also a better story: the benefit came from a detailed, effortful exercise, not from the act of owning a pen.

What happens to a written goal at the alarm?

Take a student from that probation group who finished the program and really did write out the future she wanted. Her plan probably includes a first lecture, a library session before work, a morning she is up and moving. All of that sits downstream of one small decision, made while she is lying in bed, warm, with nobody looking.

The study has nothing to say about that decision, and goal-writing research in general has little to say about it. A detailed plan can name the obstacle (“I will want to go back to sleep”) and prescribe a response. It cannot enforce the response at the moment of temptation, because the person doing the enforcing is the same one who is tired.

This is the narrow place DontSnooze fits, and it is narrow. The iOS app will not stop the alarm until you record a photo or video showing you are out of bed, and that proof goes to friends you picked in advance. It does nothing to help you write a goal, elaborate it or reflect on it. It does not know whether your goal is a good one. What it adds is a witness at the one decision a written goal cannot reach: someone who will see whether you got up. No study has tested whether that raises GPAs, and nothing here claims it does. If you already have a concrete plan with a wake-up in it, the app is a way to make the first step of that plan visible to people who care.

Gail Matthews’s 2015 summary points in a similar direction. Participants who sent weekly progress reports to a friend reported more achievement than those who only wrote their goals, but it was a bundled condition, so it is a hint rather than proof (details in the FAQ).

The practical read from McGill is the part within reach tonight. Write the goal for three to five years out. Then write the concrete steps, and the thing most likely to stop you from taking the first one. If the first step is a 6:30 wake-up, decide in advance who will know about it.