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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

#161

Post by Ekaros »

wongarsu wrote: post #152
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 vi…

I remember at that age that my sight was going worse quite quickly. So in process there will be many points where your glasses might be slightly lacking.

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

#162

Post by gqcwwjtg »

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.

Is that distinction worth making here? There’s no way to “assess independently” the work of each student without some amount of randomness. But I think that’s okay, because isn’t randomly distributed unfairness just… fairness?

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

#163

Post by pks016 »

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.

Yes, while grading we divide the students by their last names.

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

#164

Post by kkylin »

jcla1 wrote: post #117
cvwright wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This sounds like an organisational nightmare to be honest. You'd be going through the pile of exams multiple times (at least twice) and what do you do if there are multiple mistakes that are common in a single exam question? Also: if you're sorting into "mistakes piles" for single exercises, how can you parallelise marking of separate and independent questions?

Online tools like Gradescope make this a little less painful (but still painful), but sometimes it's what's needed, especially on problems that are a little open-ended.

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

#165

Post by ghaff »

wongarsu wrote: post #159
ghaff wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, but I'm not sure conference proposals by themselves actually have a lot of value given that, in many cases (ask me how I know), the presentations won't actually exist until week or two before the the event.

Certainly a talk by X that's totally unconnected from anything they're directly involved with has less value.

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

#166

Post by gonzo41 »

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…

Have you ever thought about just passing out a set of grades on random to random individuals and see how that shakes out. Like totally random and unjustified grades. D minus for an A+ student. A+ for fails etc. Just random chaos. Then just score the final correctly and see the effect?

Or just having a Kafkaesque pass fail grade with no feedback for each student relative to their own performance over time with an expected growth rate applied?

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

#167

Post by kkylin »

smogcutter wrote: post #107
V__ wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not a big fan of putting everything in the cloud, but one of the advantages of online grading systems is that it is easier to make this kind of adjustment. The workflow goes like this: make a rubric item for a specific kind of mistake (it takes a little experience to know which mistakes are likely one-off and which ones are likely to be repeated by other students), assign X points, and later if you decide there are worse mistakes, adjust the points and that gets applied to everyone.

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

#168

Post by TrianguloY »

As a different but similar situation: I have a first name that is usually at the top when sorted alphabetically. Nowadays it's not a problem anymore, but as a kid I usually received a lot of calls from people that either misclicked or didn't know how to use a phone properly. It turned out it was because I was the first on the phonebook list.

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

#169

Post by kkylin »

cvwright wrote: post #122
jcla1 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like an organisational nightmare to be honest. You'd be going through the pile of exams multiple times (at least twice) and what do you do if there are multiple mistakes that are common in a single exam question? Also: if you're sorting into "mistakes piles" for single exercises, how can you parallelise marking of separate and independent questions?

Teach at a broke public university, and you never have to juggle huge teams of TAs.

Even at top-notch universities (public or private), when I talk to retired faculty, grading almost always comes up as a reason they don't want to teach anymore.

[Edit: not disagreeing with your point.]

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

#170

Post by pks016 »

dheera wrote: post #136
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 saw the title I would have thought that the higher concentrations of Asian names starting with V, W, X, Y, Z would have led to higher grades at that end of the alphabet, and thought that effect would have eclipsed anything else.

Anecdotally, the course I grade has this effect (just looking at the average score). I have been grading this course from last 5 years(9-10 times). Last names with L-Z score slightly more than A-L.
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