I noticed this in myself last time I was as a TA. I'd go back and re-grade the first 15 assignments or so to make sure the rules were being applied consistently.
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
#202I 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…
> [..] As a fairly shy kid, this already annoyed me in first grade.
(I suppose the cons outweighted the cons.)
Did you perceive any pros?
I suppose one way to do grades is first read through all papers to get an idea of the levels of the students. Though you still have bias/nepotism and such then. Perhaps a teamwork or commitee would work, or teachers swapping classes/schools?
I had a French teacher on high school who dropped a pen on list of students and then where it landed that person would get rehearsal. People in mid (waves) were fried.
Plus, there is also the issue of certain last names being common in certain cultures, leading to skewed statistics.
Re: U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades
#203Re: U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Do none of your friends like or dislike any of your other friends?
Re: U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades
#205I 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.
It's hard when you are the only TA for 260 students who get 3 assignments per week, you must also hold free hours and you aren't allowed to go over 27 hrs each week so the school isnt breaking federal laws.
Re: U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades
#206I 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…
While this helps the students with names lower down the order, people who are graded later still suffer.
Re: U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades
#207Serious unintended consequences of ordering… Reminds me of the hungry judge effect [1] - judges tend to be more harsh before a break and more lenient after. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungry_judge_effect
https://nautil.us/impossibly-hungry-judges-236688/
> we should dismiss this finding, simply because it is impossible. When we interpret how impossibly large the effect size is, anyone with even a modest understanding of psychology should be able to conclude that it is impossible that this data pattern is caused by a psychological mechanism. As psychologists, we shouldn’t teach or cite this finding, nor use it in policy decisions as an example of psychological bias in decision making.
Re: U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades
#208I 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…
For final exams, we use to mark across all sections of a course (so for 101 type courses, this can be hundreds to 1000s of papers).
Get all the profs and TA's together, break in to groups taking one problem or set of problems. Then you random sample (each group takes a stack) to get a feel for the 'typical' errors, once that's done - you are a machine going through the stacks.
Every once in a while (not that often) you run into a novel error or approach, and the group discusses.
Re: U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades
#209If we changed our policy of exams from discriminative to evaluative, grading bias would be a trivial issue but here we are since we just NEED ways to fit everyone into numbers that we can easily use.
Re: U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades
#210As 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?
As the other poster said, the order of standup and other such things. Having a "Z" means that you're usually last, and sometimes people make a point of "hey let's do it in reverse today" where I end up being first.
I remember when working on joint tasks, by the time it got to me, most of the people that worked with me had already given their updates and details. So when it was my turn, I'd say "same as A, B, C", cause they'd given all the juicy details.
Other than that, it's pretty straightforward and boring. The world doesn't magically function differently for us.