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

Observed Effect & Likely Causes

• Many commenters who grade or have graded say the result matches their experience: order affects strictness.
• Proposed mechanisms:
  • Fatigue and reduced attention over long grading sessions.
  • Evolving standards as graders see more answers, discover common mistakes, and adjust what counts as “minor” vs “major”.
  • Desire to maintain a monotonic rank of papers, causing “ratcheting” down of scores later in the stack.
• Some note that a minority of graders seem to get stricter earlier and more lenient later, so individual patterns differ; the published result is seen as an aggregate.

Randomization, Fairness, and Bias

• Strong support for shuffling grading order so no fixed group (e.g., late-alphabet surnames) is systematically disadvantaged.
• Debate:
  • One camp: “Evenly distributing an unavoidable bias is effectively fixing it” at the cohort level.
  • Another camp: it merely spreads unfairness; some individuals will still be repeatedly unlucky.
• Several suggest more structured schemes (e.g., alternating order, variance-reduction patterns) to reduce how often the same students are at the “harsh” end.

Grading Practices & Constraints

• Many graders describe:
  • Using detailed rubrics, problem-by-problem grading, or multiple passes to keep standards consistent.
  • Time, pay, and workload constraints make two-pass grading or multi-grader systems hard, especially with large classes.
  • Online systems (Canvas, Gradescope, similar tools) often default to alphabetic order and strongly shape grading workflows.
• Some institutions already pseudonymize exams with candidate numbers, but posters note that anonymity alone doesn’t fix ordering bias unless submissions are also shuffled.

Magnitude, Impact, and Skepticism

• Effect size cited (~0.6 points on a 100-point scale between early and late surnames) is viewed by some as practically minor “noise,” by others as meaningful when aggregated across many courses or when a few high-stakes exams dominate the grade.
• Several note the huge dataset makes small effects statistically detectable but worry about overinterpreting them.
• A minority expect this could be another non-replicating social-science result; others counter that it is highly plausible and easy to re-test.

Broader Order Effects

• Commenters connect this to:
  • Interview and hiring order.
  • Ballot ordering in elections.
  • Classroom seating, roll call, and who gets teacher attention.
• General consensus: order effects are real, subtle, and often baked into tools and procedures without much thought.