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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

#251

Post by wolverine876 »

stikit wrote: post #94

A .3 point difference isn’t going to make a real difference to anyone’s life and is likely a wash when other yet undiscovered biases are in the mix. Unfairness and bias is a critical factor in driving people to extraordinary achievements.

> Unfairness and bias is a critical factor in driving people to extraordinary achievements.

The evidence is a strong negative correlation between bias and achievement: Extraordinary achievements so disproportionately achieved by people in groups that are not the target of bias. Look at top government officials, SV leaders, Nobel Prize winners, etc etc - mostly white males.

The biggest targets of bias in the US, for example - probably women and black people - genrerally get the worst results (in areas where there is discrimination). By contrast, as an example wherever black people aren't subject to bias, such as certain forms of music and certain sports, achievement is extraordinary. Imagine all that talent and drive in other fields.

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

#252

Post by mixmastamyk »

wolverine876 wrote: post #248
mixmastamyk wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He “only cheated himself.” :-D

The point is to develop skills and knowledge, so I would agree. Do you disagree?

I agree, but we used to cringe at this saying when young, so funny to bring it back now.

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

#253

Post by godelski »

DangitBobby wrote: post #219
godelski wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of cliques. I give them the definition: insight everyone can recite but nobody can act upon.

I think you mean clichés.

I do. Gotta live swipe and homophones

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

#254

Post by starttoaster »

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…

This might come off rude on accident, but I mean genuinely without malice. When I'm writing an essay to submit to my professor/teacher, I am asked to make multiple drafts to get a proper end result that is ready to submit. Understanding that educational staff is already often overworked, should I expect _less_ from the person I receive my education from? If you acknowledge that many of the grades I receive are actually not fair to me, and there's an attempt to randomize the order that papers are graded, many of the grades that I received (whether high or low) were done partially (that is to say, the opposite of "impartially".) And there's a real concern that in your example where the submissions are committed to a repository that you need to shuffle, that my submission ends up in a similar position in the stack week after week, unless you're actually doing something to ensure my position in the stack is different between submissions. It's probably sufficient in many cases but doesn't guarantee randomness unless the algorithm to randomize submissions takes previous stack orderings into account.

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

#255

Post by jamiek88 »

starttoaster wrote: post #254
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…

This might come off rude on accident, but I mean genuinely without malice. When I'm writing an essay to submit to my professor/teacher, I am asked to make multiple drafts to get a proper end result that is ready to submit. Understanding that educational staff is already often overworked, should I expect _less_ from the person I receive my education from? If you acknowledge that many of the grades I receive are actual…

It’s simply human nature. Teachers can either lie to themselves and you about it or mitigate it. What more could you possible want from them as humans?

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

#256

Post by starttoaster »

jamiek88 wrote: post #255
starttoaster wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might come off rude on accident, but I mean genuinely without malice. When I'm writing an essay to submit to my professor/teacher, I am asked to make multiple drafts to get a proper end result that is ready to submit. Understanding that educational staff is already often overworked, should I expect _less_ from the person I receive my education from? If you acknowledge that many of the grades I receive are actual…

It’s simply human nature. Teachers can either lie to themselves and you about it or mitigate it. What more could you possible want from them as humans?

I somewhat assumed there would be commenters suggesting the human angle as a retort. That's why I prefaced with both "this is what the teacher expects of me" and "understanding that educational staff is already often overworked." It just seems to me that the current systems aren't sufficient, and acknowledging that is what leads people to improving those systems. The above commentor suggested what they do in academia as workarounds to what the study showed, and I'm saying even that is not sufficient.

It seems like you're agreeing with me, but jumping to their defense with "people are fallible." People are fallible, that's why we build systems to take human elements out of it. Recognizing where humanity has soured something is key to that.

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

#257

Post by bobthepanda »

mschuster91 wrote: post #236
bobthepanda wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 virtua…

I think it is rational that students can feel entitled to that.

I also think that the vast majority of poorly paid, non-tenured professors and other teaching staff don't love being the targets of this harassment, since it's not their fault and largely out of their control, and it's not like they're getting the bulk of the tuition money. (That mostly goes to administrative expenses and sports programs.)

Heck, most adjunct faculty are often paid below minimum wage and qualify for food stamps.

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

#258

Post by SamBam »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #207
candrewlee14 wrote: post #199

Serious 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 poli…

Odd article. It simply states that the effect size is too big to be believable (it calls it repeatedly "impossible," but it doesn't seem like it can possibly mean "literally impossible" or "mathematically impossible.") It doesn't give any alternative explanations or specific ways the study is wrong. And it links to a rebuttal by the original authors where the responded to a bunch of the suggestions for data error or confounding factors and found that their results remain.

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

#259

Post by thaumasiotes »

SamBam wrote: post #258
thaumasiotes wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 poli…

Odd article. It simply states that the effect size is too big to be believable (it calls it repeatedly "impossible," but it doesn't seem like it can possibly mean "literally impossible" or "mathematically impossible.") It doesn't give any alternative explanations or specific ways the study is wrong. And it links to a rebuttal by the original authors where the responded to a bunch of the suggestions for data error or…

That is explained in pretty much the section I quoted. The explanation of the effect is given in the article's links.

But the article is written specifically to make the point that it should be enough to observe that it isn't possible for the effect to be real. You aren't making a good point when you cite an effect that is obviously nonsense.

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

#260

Post by brewdad »

coredog64 wrote: post #247
CuriousCosmic wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are not going to be a solution. LLMs have absolutely no concept of truth. And not everything has an objective solution. Even those that do often have a process associated with them and factoring in that work/process is an important part of grading. Reducing that subjective grading process to only objective solutions being right is grossly reductive and disproportionately punishes students who have the process ri…

The LLM can compile verbose prose down to a short summary. If the summaries of each chunk are consistent, then it’s at least structurally well written. Then you grade the summary itself.

At that point you are grading the work of the LLM, not the student.
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