Despite what we hear about bias, a massive study found that teachers actually grade students pretty fairly regardless of their names or backgrounds.
This research challenges the popular belief that unconscious prejudices significantly skew academic assessments. When teachers were tested using randomized student profiles, their grading remained remarkably consistent and unbiased.
Fairness in grading: Randomizing Ethnicity and Gender in Teacher Assessments
SSRN · 6545376
We investigate the impact of ethnicity and gender on teacher assessments through a randomized controlled experiment involving 203 teachers grading a single class’s assignments. Within teachers we randomly assigned names, signaling gender and ethnicity, with a control group grading anonymized assignments. We find no statistically significant evidence of grading bias based on student name, ethnicity or gender, unlike previous studies. This holds even among teachers with stronger implicit biases. H