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U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades
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Re: U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades
#12Anchoring?
Re: U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades
#13Order effects are real. I'm a prof. I notice that the longer I grade, the less motivated I am to take off points and then justify why I took off those points. It's easier just to give points and move on. (And if anybody wants to criticize this, I'll be happy to launch into a diatribe on the psychometric dumpster fire that most assignments and their associated grading scales really are.)
Re: U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades
#14Maybe the answer is smaller groups?
Re: U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades
#15As someone whose initials are Z and W, I tend to notice alpha sort a lot. Asking a friend whose initials are A and B about this, it's not something they ever noticed.
I haven't noticed a grading/ranking difference, but far more frequently I'll hear that "oh, we ran out of item/time/etc. before we got to you", which has made me much more sensitive to issues of planning/organization.
Re: U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades
#16>“We kind of suspect that fatigue is one of the major factors that is driving this effect, because when you’re working on something for a long period of time, you get tired and then you start to lose your attention and your cognitive abilities are dropping,” Pei said.
there is a similar effect found here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungry_judge_effect
Re: U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades
#17At my university, almost all of our marking was pseudonymised. We were assigned a random candidate number at the beginning of each year, and that is what went on our important papers/exams. The less important coursework often didn’t bother with this, and used our student numbers instead, but the general idea was the same. We didn’t put our names on any of our work other than our dissertation (and a few trivial assign…
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Re: U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades
#18This seems related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39672111 As in, order matters
Re: U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades
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Re: U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades
#20> Wang noted that for a small group of graders (about 5%) that grade from Z to A, the grade gap flips as expected This is critical. Otherwise we could not discount some group (e.g. some ethnicity) disproportionately occupying one end of the alphabet or another. Super interesting and important finding. I hope this gets wide visibility and universities take a break from politicking to fix the problem - presumably throu…
Enforced randomization isn't going to fix the problem, it just evenly distributes the problem. Based on these results, it would mean that the graders are just getting tired/lazy/inattentive the further they get in their stack of papers to grade. That's the problem the needs to be fixed, not the order they get graded in. Enforced randomization is simply a short term alleviation so no student(s) get disproportionately…
> graders are just getting tired/lazy/inattentive the further they get in their stack of papers to grade.
I will admit to this. Initially, my patience and tolerance for errors is significantly higher than towards the end of the grading. By the second hour grading, I am not only mentally exhausted my tolerance is significantly lower.
I try to prevent this by creating very explicit grading rubric and I stick to it as much as possible.