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

record.umich.edu

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

#281

Post by Jsebast24 »

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…

Only people who's last name start with an A can relate. The rest, I have found, just don't care. It's a curse you have to carry from 1st grade and all through school and college.

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

#282

Post by spullara »

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #240
karaterobot wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is amazing.

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

#283

Post by barfbagginus »

advael wrote: post #263
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…

I know it's not the point of your post, but I think it's worth pointing out that you're misunderstanding randomness (albeit in a very typical way). Although randomness is likely eventually (over a lot of instances) going to be the most "fair" way to distribute where your submission is in the order, it does not guarantee that it will always be different, and in fact a "random" algorithm that took previous orderings in…

I don't think they're misunderstanding randomness.

They are claiming that randomness is not sufficient for fairness.

And I agree. Adding some determinacy to the shuffling design would reduce the variance of unfair scores that students receive. Ie, it could reduce the likelihood that a student's scores will be biased by a run of advantaged or disadvantaged scoring orders.

It wouldn't be very hard to design such a scheme. It would produce fairer results in the short run. And in the long run, it would converge to the same fair averages as the fully random process.

In fact it would converge faster. This short run statistical efficiency matters. Students don't have access to the long run results - since they're evaluated in the short run.

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

#284

Post by spullara »

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.

Have an LLM at 0 temperature with the correct answers in context grade it?
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