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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

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be irrationally upset about my light-hearted anecdote. I sincerely hope your weekend gets better.

It was just a simple observation. You are reading into things too much. There's no need to be so defensive. Your comment hasn't upset me in the slightest ( rationally or irrationally ) and I sincerely hope you weren't offended by mine.

> It must be exhausting being married to a woman who wants to 'buck tradition'. Why didn't she buck tradition and just name your kids 'Aa, Aa', 'Aaa, Aaa', etc and be done with it? Heck why not go all the way and let them go nameless.

You managed to combine snarky reductio ad absurdum and a gratuitous attack on his wife in three sentences. Why wouldn't someone be annoyed by that?

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

#232
post #154

Earlier 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.

just want to add that in my lifetime that switched from being "by last name" to "by first name". So, Yusuf Ahmed and Abraham Zigfeld experienced a noticeable shift in popularity that they were totally unprepared for

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

#233
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He “only cheated himself.” :-D

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

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

what do you mean AI? you must be joking.

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

#235
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…

We tried a lot of things. What eventually worked was ending grades. You mastered the material or you did not; perhaps a couple of students mastered it with high marks. Obvs this takes an administration that is OK with that, which most aren't.

Having hired a lot of engineers, I can tell you that mastery of material is nothing close to a bimodal distribution.

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

#236
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Given that students have taken on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt that they'll have to repay no matter what and on top of that a lot of jobs being completely out of reach these days without an academic degree (that for fucks sake isn't remotely required by virtually all jobs requiring it!), that's completely understandable.

Want to fix higher education? Bring the hammer down on companies abusing it as a proxy for legally discriminating against classes of society that are closely correlated with poor academic outcomes. Academic education should be reserved for the best of the best of our youth, and it should be fully paid for by the government, not simply another hurdle to pass to get a job that pays barely more than flipping burgers.

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

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

what do you mean AI? you must be joking.

Imagine a question: compare bubble sort and quick sort algorithm.

Some students might mix up the algorithms, some might give the incorrect computation complexity, some might describe them incorrectly in some way.

Manually grade some (or all of) the answers by noting the kinds of things students got wrong (e.g. the above criteria). Then, feed in to ChatGPT (or your favorite alternative) the answer + the categories of mistakes to expect.

Here's a simplified example: https://chat.openai.com/share/bf801e12-51d5-4255-9968-bbf91b...

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

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I moved states and schools midway through 3rd grade and was seated alphabetically, in the back, for the first time in my life. The teachers in my previous school knew me to be a model student, so would sit me up front "to set an example."

My parents couldn't figure out for the life of them why I was suddenly struggling and thought I was having adjustment issues. I had taught myself to read when I was 3; how could I suddenly be having trouble keeping up?

It took longer to figure out because I was only nearsighted in one eye. I was tall for my grade, so as long as the person in front of me to the left was shorter than me or the teacher was writing high enough on the board, I was fine, because my left eye was fine. But when everything aligned just wrong, I was suddenly helpless, because my right eye could barely see clearly an arm's length from my face! It's a hard thing to notice when only one of your eyes isn't working very well, especially when you're 9.

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

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think many people use their phone contact list like that.

I wouldn't be surprised. It's very natural. Probably not for that specific use case but if for some reason you are actually going through the list then it's natural

Plus, it's common for me to meet someone on a first-name basis and not find out their last name right away. And people's last names change more often than their first names. Phone sorting by first name is the way to go.

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

#240

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.

Probably it would be something like as follows:

Have a group of N graders. And a parity of k. Let's say N is 6 and k is 2. Randomly shuffle the assignments and partition the assignments into N groups.

Each grader gets assigned k of the N groups such that they share at most 1 overlap with any other grader and each group is assigned to k people. The assignment orders are shuffled for each grader. They mark up and then grade the assignments.

Then for each of the N groups, randomly shuffle the group and equally distribute the assignments to the N-k graders.

Now each grader reviews the assignment grades/markups (in random order) and assigns a grade based on the k grades/markups from the previous rounds along with a rationale for the grade assigned.

From there the student receives the final assigned grade, the rationale for the grade, and the k markups. If they have a complaint they can go to the professor (who then can also see the k initial grades along with everything else) to dispute the grade for the assignment.

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This way each TA only has to mark up (class size * k / N) assignments, and review (class size / N) assignments to assign a final grade (which should take far less time to do than the initial markups). On top of that every assignment has a guaranteed (k + 1) separate eyes on it. And then the professors can serve as an unbiased arbiter while retaining all the context from the process.

To take it an additional step further, the professors could sample a random subset of the assignments to verify the markup and grading is going properly.

And those reviews/grade adjustments can then be recorded (along with the final grade/rationales) to document how a given TA's grading deviates from the final reviewed grade or the grade the professor assigns. Likewise for a TA's final assigned grade deviating from the professor's. This would allow deviations to be mitigated over time and major deviations to be identified.

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