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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

#141

Post by levocardia »

> 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. Likewise, students with later-in-the-alphabet surnames received a 0.3-point lower grade — creating a 0.6-point gap.

The hand-wringing over such a small effect size seems unwarranted. I suspect you would find similar effect sizes for other small interventions, like whether the grading took place during the week or the weekend, or in the morning vs. the evening.

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

#142

Post by user_7832 »

nsriv wrote: post #125
ryandrake wrote: post #79

Maybe related, or maybe not, but I remember when I was in K-12 school back in the 80s and early 90s, they would always seat us physically in the class front-to-back by last name. So the kids with last names starting with A-D or so would always be in front, and the kids with last names starting with U-Z would be in the back. For every class. I remember this because many of my friends had last names "near" my last name…

I'm a teacher now, and this made me wince. It's exactly how I've been told by my parents that seating worked for them in school (India, 60s-80s) but their grading was done by semi-anonymous roll numbers.

Today I'm 99% sure all CBSE board exams (I think equivalent to A-levels?) are randomized heavily. However I did notice the name's alphabetical order effect in school, albeit in a minor way (folks with later letters were less involved in anything a teacher might need a volunteer for).

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

#143

Post by smeej »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #42
zdw wrote: post #15

As 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.

Outside of school I can’t think of even a single instance of alphabetical sorting of my name (I have a middle letter). What situations are you in that this comes up a lot?

My mom made the critical mistake of marrying from first five letters down to last five letters during the police academy, only later to be released from the "we have to expose you to tear gas so you know how it feels and only use it judiciously" chamber in alphabetical order by last name.

It was 40ish years ago and I still don't think she's forgiven my dad.

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

#144

Post by user_7832 »

redandblack wrote: post #123

When I studied engineering in India, we never put our names in the finals at college. Every one gets a exam id and that goes in the answer sheets. Also, it is never your professor who grades you - the answer sheets are collected and lecturers/professors will correct them at the state level across all the engineering colleges in my state. I do not know how it is now as there has been an explosion of colleges in the st…

As far as I know even now it's the same for government universities (eg Delhi/Mumbai Uni). But private unis may just have a few/one profs grade everything.

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

#145

Post by verdverm »

somenameforme wrote: post #96
verdverm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlikely. If you talk with anyone who's done grading, this will likely jive with our experience and make us data aware of the outcomes. Like anything, with grading you can get into a flow, and the more you process an assignment, the more answers you've seen and those can change how you grade future answers

Not really taking a position on this one way or the other, but I would say that "this jives with my experience" is near to being a prerequisite for junk science. Somebody saying something controversial is going to be challenged -- confirming biases is precisely how you peddle junk. For instance the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology [1] is a terrible journal, with a replication success rate in the 20% range…

I absolutely observed my own biases and created techniques to mitigate... a few that come to mind

1. Grade problem by problem. This actually makes grading sooo much easier on your own mind

2. Take a second pass to look for outliers in consistency

3. When possible, craft problems that can be automatically graded for correctness. This leaves more time for commentary on the quality of the solution

(I taught computer science, which lends itself to some of this)

The harder bias to handle is the one you develop for students one way or another through the course of a semester or course. Perceived effort shifts grades

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

#146

Post by nextos »

cvwright wrote: post #101
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 i…

My CS school implemented OCR test sheets, with some exceptions, and equivalent strategies, such as test suites and benchmarks for programming assignments. This was done to avoid subjective grading, as it was a big issue even in well-intentioned cases.

Often, you still get big problems, but the set of solutions is small. It's always three options plus a fourth option (none / all). If you make a mistake you score negative points. It's not perfect, sometimes wording is ambiguous and it's unclear whether you need to tick the fourth catch-all option, but I found it better than the alternatives as it removes most arbitrariness from the process, but obviously has other issues.

Regular exams often had wildly different grading standards for the same course depending on the class, and thus on the professor who was correcting exams. This was really annoying.

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

#147

Post by hu3 »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #42
zdw wrote: post #15

As 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.

Outside of school I can’t think of even a single instance of alphabetical sorting of my name (I have a middle letter). What situations are you in that this comes up a lot?

Company Discord of a client. My name is among the top.

It's a remote job so, being frequently visible in that list can be an advantage.

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

#148

Post by kaashif »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #42
zdw wrote: post #15

As 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.

Outside of school I can’t think of even a single instance of alphabetical sorting of my name (I have a middle letter). What situations are you in that this comes up a lot?

I have a middle letter and also don't remember this happening much.

We should ask people with later letters if they remember this more.

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

#149

Post by yeahwhatever10 »

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…

When I was a TA I always did a second pass to make sure everything was even. It’s not that hard.

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

#150

Post by wryoak »

sdwr wrote: post #116
StevenXC wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like most inequities, those who are in the benefiting group frequently don't realize that privilege.

They realize (bring form to, make real) them, but don't realize (understand) them

I hate how much I love this worthlessly picky comment
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