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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

#151

Post by madeofpalk »

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…

> you have to shuffle the order in which you grade these submissions each week, for fairness

I don't think this is fair. It's just a more randomly distributed unfairness, rather than by a deterministic factor (like the student's name)

'Fair' would be each student is assessed independently for the work they did, rather than their mark being impacted by how early or late they were marked.

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

#152

Post by wongarsu »

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…

"students who sit closer are more likely to be high achievers" might also be the source of most of the stereotypes of people with glasses. It took me years to realize I'm mildly shortsighted, so the first half of school I chose seats in the front half of the classroom to make reading the blackboard easier. Many of my friends had glasses and preferred to sit up front because their glasses didn't fully correct their vision.

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

#153

Post by luplex »

madeofpalk wrote: post #151
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…

> you have to shuffle the order in which you grade these submissions each week, for fairness I don't think this is fair. It's just a more randomly distributed unfairness, rather than by a deterministic factor (like the student's name) 'Fair' would be each student is assessed independently for the work they did, rather than their mark being impacted by how early or late they were marked.

There are many notions of "fairness", many of which are logically incompatible with each other.

In this example, I think it's kind of fair to give everyone an equal chance of being advantaged. You're not hurting anyone specifically.

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

#154

Post by wryoak »

IshKebab wrote: post #138
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yeah I don't think it really happens outside school, but school is pretty formative and it happens all the time in school.

It happens in your phone contacts when you’re deciding who to talk to. You’re starting with your Abrahams, Billys and Changs, probably rarely reaching out to your Xaviers, Yusufs and Zeldas about going out tonight because you’ve already assembled a crew by the time you reach the Mimis, Natashas and Ottos.

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

#155

Post by alephknoll »

jedberg wrote: post #127

This is basically the reason my kids have the last name that they do. My last name starts with E and my wife's with Y. Bucking tradition, she didn't change her name when we got married, so when we had kids we had to decide what name to give them. We opted to hyphenate. Historically, hyphenated last names were [Woman's last name]-[Man's last name]. However, my wife hated that her last name was near the end of the alph…

[flagged]

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

#156

Post by zvolsky »

jedberg wrote: post #127

This is basically the reason my kids have the last name that they do. My last name starts with E and my wife's with Y. Bucking tradition, she didn't change her name when we got married, so when we had kids we had to decide what name to give them. We opted to hyphenate. Historically, hyphenated last names were [Woman's last name]-[Man's last name]. However, my wife hated that her last name was near the end of the alph…

Haha, I've always enjoyed being at the end getting less attention from teachers. If the data merely shows a correlation, it may as well be explained by us at the end being under less pressure.

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

#158

Post by shepherdjerred »

madeofpalk wrote: post #151
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…

> you have to shuffle the order in which you grade these submissions each week, for fairness I don't think this is fair. It's just a more randomly distributed unfairness, rather than by a deterministic factor (like the student's name) 'Fair' would be each student is assessed independently for the work they did, rather than their mark being impacted by how early or late they were marked.

It would be essentially impossible to have something "truly" fair for open-ended questions since humans are stateful.

Maybe this is a case that AI could actually do quite well.

Manually grade the answers and identify the classes of mistakes. Then hand the classes of mistakes to the AI and ask for it to determine which answers have which types of mistakes.

Once you've done that, you just need to associate a deduction for each type of mistake and do some simple math.

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

#159

Post by wongarsu »

ghaff wrote: post #80
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…

University exams, this probably makes a lot of sense. After all, the exam is the exam and whether a student is well-spoken and actively participates in class shouldn't matter for an exam grade. I'm less convinced that blinded conference proposals are a good idea--an argument I've had with various people. If you know based on past experience that someone will almost certainly hit a home run, I'm less inclined to pick…

You could try to work around that by first grading all anonymized proposals, then grading all potential speakers without knowing their proposal. In the third round you deanonymize and look at the weighted average of the two grades. You probably still need some judgment calls because the combination of speaker and topic can be important. But the score would give you a good base to work of.

Maybe you could make it even more impartial by allowing conditional scores in the first two rounds. Like "Jim is a 6, but a 8 if his talk is about molecular biology" or "this Lessons Learnt talk is a 5, but if it's by X, Y or Z it's a 9"

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

#160

Post by kwhitefoot »

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…

A lot of bachelor's degrees these days are awarded on the basis of modules with no finals. For instance when I did a course on C# a few years ago in Norway that was worth 6 points (I got full marks :-) ). If I had done another 29 modules of similar difficulty I would have got 180 points and been awarded a BSc in Computer Science.

It's quite different from the way it was when I studied physics in the 1970s when only the final counted. Annual exams only determined whether one was allowed to continue but had no effect on the class of degree that was awarded.

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