What Does the First Letter of Your Surname Say About Your Grades? More, According to the study.
The research is described in a 2024 draft paper posted on the SSRN website, formerly known as the Social Science Research Network. It is currently being edited by the academic journal Management Science.
Researchers have found a rating bias at the end of letters in many articles. However, the grading penalty was more pronounced in social sciences and humanities compared to engineering, science and medicine.
In addition to lower grades, the researchers also found that students below the letter received negative and disrespectful comments. For example, “why are there no answers to Q 2 and 3? You’re setting yourself up for a failing grade,” and “NEVER DO THAT AGAIN.” Readers at the top of the alphabet may have found, “Best work in this draft, [Student First Name]! Thank you!”
The researchers can’t prove for sure why more points are deducted from the Wilsons of the world, but they suspect that it’s because the teachers – especially the graduates of an unnamed university in this study – have heavy grading loads and get tired and confused, especially after getting the grades. 50th student in a row. Even before the era of electronic editing, it was possible for teachers to be unfair to students at the bottom of piles of paper. But on paper, the student’s position in the stack was constantly changing, depending on when the papers were submitted and how the instructors took them. No student is likely to be below par all the time. In the world of LMS, U, V, W, X, Y and Z are almost always there.
Another theory put forward by the authors of the paper is that lecturers may feel the need to be stricter once they have issued a series of A’s, so that they are not too generous with high grades. Low-performing students may fall victim to a well-intentioned effort to curb grade inflation. It is also possible that teachers are more generous with students at the top of the alphabet, but grade more precisely as they progress. In any case, the lower students are organized differently.
Some college teachers seem to be aware of their own personal weaknesses. In 2018, someone posted on the Canvas message board, asking the company to randomly change the grade book. “For me, bias begins to set in with fatigue,” the pastor wrote. “I study a few grades, I leave it, I do a few more, and I rest. Even if it is the goal when I am not in a determined situation.”
If you’ve read this far, you’re probably wondering how the researchers knew the U-to-Z student grades were wrong. Maybe they are relatively bad students? But researchers matched Canvas grades to student records in the registrar’s office and were able to control for a host of student characteristics, from high school grades and college GPA to race, ethnicity, gender, family background and income. Last names with letter endings always received lower marks even among the same students marked by the same teacher.
The researchers also found that a small percentage of teachers were connected to default settings and were arranged in alphabetical order, from Z to A. That led to exactly the opposite results; students with surnames ending in letters received the highest marks, while the marks for the surnames A, B and C were the lowest.
Last name bias is probably not unique to students using Canvas LMS. All four major LMS companies, which together control 90 percent of the US and Canadian market with more than 48 million students, order shipments alphabetically for editing, according to the researchers. Even Coursera, a unique online learning platform, does it this way.
Wang’s solution is to shake things up and have the LMS introduce random grading of student work. Indeed, Canvas added a random tutoring option in May 2024, after the company saw an outline of this University of Michigan study. “It was something we had on our radar and had heard from other users, but we hadn’t finalized it,” a company spokesperson said. “A report from the University of Michigan prioritized that work.”
However, the default is always sorted alphabetically and instructors need to navigate to settings to change it. (Changing this setting, according to the authors of the study, has “low visibility” within the system settings on the site.) I hope this article helps to get the word out.
This story is about learning management systems written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger reporta non-profit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up Evidence Points and so on Hechinger newsletters.
