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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

#101

Post by cvwright »

lqet wrote: post #41

I work in academia. When we grade exams, the order of the exams on the stack is the order in which they were collected in the room (people can sit wherever they like). For grading, we are usually 5 people in a single room, and everyone grades a specific exercise for consistency. The exams are getting shuffled heavily , with everyone just grabbing stacks, looking for exams where "their" exercise was not yet graded, an…

My strategy was to, like you said, grade problem by problem. Then for each problem, first find all those who got full marks. Then group the others into piles based on what mistakes they made.

This ensures that everyone who made the same mistake(s) gets the same grade. It also tends to shuffle the order of the exams after every problem.

Obviously you don’t need this strategy for simple multiple choice questions, and it’s probably also not a great fit for long-form essays. But it worked great for technical short answer problems in CS and security.

Re: U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades

#102

Post by bmacho »

danilor wrote: post #89

Has anybody found this link to this study? Or even the title? I searched the authors in google scholar but I couldn't find it.

https://ssrn.com/abstract=4603146

Not on sci-hub, but downloadable in pdf for me without any issues

Re: U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades

#104

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

noodlesUK wrote: post #6

At 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…

I think I get better feedback when the teacher knows who I am. Grades are secondary.

Re: U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades

#105

Post by cm2187 »

We know there are big disparities of academic success by ethnic group (cf the whole harvard discrimination against asians controversy), and there are also big concentrations of patronyms by ethnic groups (or at the minimum first letters that are more common in one part of the world than another). And on top of that if the university itself discriminates against certain ethnic groups in its recruitment it will reinforce this bias (like if asians students require better grades to get in, it is unsurprising those students that get in perform better than the rest).

That would be my best guess for a rationale behind that result.

Re: U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades

#106

Post by omoikane »

noodlesUK wrote: post #6

At 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…

I had classes like that, where at the beginning of the quarter, each student gets assigned an username of the form " " and all participation is based on username from then on. Even though the usernames are seemingly random, certain usernames started gaining reputations on the class discussion forums, and students come to recognize some names.

But computer science courses tend to have very objective rubrics for grading, so I am not sure the anonymity mattered much.

Re: U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades

#107

Post by smogcutter »

V__ wrote: post #88
lqet wrote: post #41

I work in academia. When we grade exams, the order of the exams on the stack is the order in which they were collected in the room (people can sit wherever they like). For grading, we are usually 5 people in a single room, and everyone grades a specific exercise for consistency. The exams are getting shuffled heavily , with everyone just grabbing stacks, looking for exams where "their" exercise was not yet graded, an…

A teacher friend of mine always goes through his stack twice. Once to correct all mistakes and a second time to write down points. As you said, once you have seen all mistakes you know how "bad" of a mistake it actually is.

> As you said, once you have seen all mistakes you know how "bad" of a mistake it actually is.

Crucially, this is not quite what the poster said. It’s not about stack ranking students against each other.

Say every paper makes the same subtle mistake, and you only notice it halfway through the pile. Unless you go back through them all, you’ll unfairly grade the later entries more harshly.

Re: U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades

#108

Post by prof-dr-ir »

Randomizing the grading order just hides the problem at the level of an individual course, but at least it helps in the average.

More worrying is when e.g. job candidates are discussed (often in alphabetical order) and people simply tire out near the end of the meeting. When this happens, be sure to suggest taking a break!

Re: U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades

#109

Post by skhunted »

falseprofit wrote: post #50
skhunted wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me I grade tests as follows. The stack is created as students turn in the test. I grade the first page in that order. The stack reverses for the second page. So on and so forth. I teach college math. I just cant imagine a system of grading done in alphabetical order.

Scanning and grading on a computer can alphabetize them.

That makes sense. I haven't had people upload assignments for a long time. I'd forgotten that this was a thing.

Re: U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades

#110

Post by ghaff »

xmddmx wrote: post #87

Is anyone confused by "lower-ranked names"? To me this means A, B, C, but the article says "Wang said students whose surnames start with A, B, C, D or E received a 0.3-point higher grade out of 100 possible points than compared with when they were graded randomly." So I guess "alphabetically lower ranked" means the last letters of the alphabet, not first? Confused.

Yeah, I misunderstood this at first and then was somewhat confused by the comments until I actually clicked through and looked that the post. :-)

I can actually believe the effect going in either direction and it's small.

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