Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

record.umich.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 284 posts

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

#221

Post by zeroonetwothree »

jedberg wrote: post #213
lelanthran wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bucking tradition, she didn't change her name when we got married, Unless you were married earlier than the 90s, I wouldn't really call that "bucking tradition" any time from, say, the mid-90s onwards. If you really want to buck tradition, then don't get married - just live together, and have kids :-) (After all, there's nothing more traditional than marriage, is there?)

In the US, 80% of women still take their husband’s last name. But you hit on an important point — a lot of couples are just skipping marriage now. We went halfway there — we bought the house together years before we got married.

Owning a house together is probably a more serious commitment anyway

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

#222

Post by jtriangle »

donatj wrote: post #137
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…

In around the year 2000 I had an essay due that day I had forgotten, and about ten minutes of computer lab time before home room in the morning. I wrote an introduction and conclusion; then filled the remainder with copy pasted chunks of the introduction and conclusion. The thought being at least I’d get a laugh. If anyone had read the thing it would have been clear it was nonsense. I received an 80% with no notes or…

I know a guy who copy/pasted a wikipedia article, in line citations and all, and submitted it for a sociology class and got an A, no notes, nothing.

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

#223

Post by jtriangle »

karaterobot wrote: post #194
spullara wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything in this thread just randomizes who doesn't get graded fairly.

Is there a better solution? It's not for teachers to be perfect. Since that's not possible, it's not a solution.

No, the solution is for the scoring to be handled by software that doesn't exist yet. Some things have easy, objective measures of correctness. STEM is mostly this way. Others, your humanities et al, are fairly subjective.

You could probably cover most of this with an LLM, and access to a large body of graded material for a given course, provided said material was graded fairly. Generating that data would be time consuming, as, any given assignment would need to be graded by as many people as possible in order to find a fair average.

From there, it's simple comparison between your sample work and the presented work. We're probably a decade from this really being viable en masse, but, it no doubt will happen, and for better or worse we'll likely end up with EDUAAS (education as a service).

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

#224

Post by bobthepanda »

kkylin wrote: post #169
cvwright wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.]

Not only is it generally time intensive, you are also subject to lots of tiring back and forth with some students about their grades.

No grading is perfect, but there’s also some undercurrent of an attitude that students have paid to be there and are entitled to a certain grade.

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

#225

Post by raydev »

underdeserver wrote: post #186
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…

Sibling comment already said so, but I want to emphasize - this requires two run-throughs (at least). When I was grading homework, it took about 5 hours a week per class per run through. They didn't pay me enough to make sense for it to be 10 hours.

A second pass wouldn't necessarily take the same amount of time, especially if you note the issues/concerns on your first pass.

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

#226

Post by underdeserver »

raydev wrote: post #225
underdeserver wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sibling comment already said so, but I want to emphasize - this requires two run-throughs (at least). When I was grading homework, it took about 5 hours a week per class per run through. They didn't pay me enough to make sense for it to be 10 hours.

A second pass wouldn't necessarily take the same amount of time, especially if you note the issues/concerns on your first pass.

True, but the overhead is large. I graded into linear algebra and intro calculus, so there were a lot of students - I think 150 or so - and most of them were wrong.

Graders know that wrong homework takes much longer than correct homework to grade. It's correct? Full marks, move on. Is it wrong? Well, how wrong is it? Did they make a bad assumption, but followed it through to its conclusion? Did they forget a minus sign? Or is it complete hogwash?

So it might not be 10 hours, but still would be around 8 hours. And that's still too much.

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

#228

Post by RheingoldRiver »

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…

In a somewhat reverse scenario, when I was in 4th grade (9 years old), I knew 100% that I was getting nearsighted, and I absolutely did NOT want glasses. Fortunately (debatable) we got to pick our seats so I always picked a seat in the very first row, where I could kinda-sorta-almost see what was written on the board if I squinted. And I was also way above my grade level so I was able to fake it pretty well for most of the year even when this started to fail me. My mom insisted on taking me to get my eyes checked about 2/3 of the way through the year and I couldn't fake my way through that, though, so I finally got glasses, but by that point I was used to sitting at the front of the room, so I choose front-of-room seats when possible for most of the rest of my schooling. There's probably some moral here but I don't know what it is.

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

#229

Post by RheingoldRiver »

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.

> Asking a friend whose initials are A and B about this, it's not something they ever noticed.

Kinda surprised, my last name starts with C and I was hyper-aware of this and how random it was probably all the way from kindergarten. Being a child and therefore an asshole, I was grateful for my advantage rather than thinking the system was unjust.

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

#230

Post by macintux »

wcunning wrote: post #193
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?

My daily standup is run by the order my boss sees the participants in the JIRA board -- My first name starts with W, so I'm last in that list. Makes staying engaged the whole meeting hard...

I'm the first in the list, which has some advantages, but I do get tired of always being the first person to throw themselves on whatever grenade is lying around.
Post reply on HN