Sophia Wushanley | Race, gender and grades

Another Look | The only fair grading is blind grading

By Sophia Wushanley 09/22/14 11:04pm

H ow much do you think your race and gen der affect your grades?

Consider the study co-conducted by Wharton professor Katherine Milkman , which showed that professors responded to emails signed with a name designed to indicate a white male student at a higher rate than emails signed with names that suggested females and minorities.

Consider also the story that recently went viral, about a man named Jose who changed his name to Joe on his resume and suddenly started hearing back from potential employers.

In both cases, names meant the difference between getting a foot in the door and shouting into the void. Brad Anderson’s email got a response. Mei Chen’s did not. Joe got an interview. Jose did not.

How can a name be such a powerful determinant of opportunity?

Names generally offer evaluators two pieces of information: gender and race. When an evaluator — be it a professor or an employer — reads a name, she is immediately primed to assess the work associated with it according to her implicit biases, the term used to describe the associations we all have in our subconscious brains that shape our perceptions of others.

Surely it’s no surprise to any of us that the race and gender we present affect how others perceive us — we all know racism and sexism exist. But what makes implicit biases insidious is the fact that their location in the subconscious means we’re completely unaware of them.

What’s more, there’s no clear correlation between our explicit biases — the ones we would admit to holding if we didn’t fear being labeled racist or sexist — and our implicit ones. Implicit biases are unaffected by how impartial a person consciously believes he is. Even the most educated and open-minded among us are influenced by prejudices that lie beneath the surface.

Because of this, everything you’ve ever put your name on has been tinged with your race and gender, be it a paper, an exam, a lab report or a resume. No matter how well you know your professors, and how earnestly they condemn prejudice in any form, a bulk of scientific literature suggests that who you are influences how they see the work you produce.

So what does this mean for your grades? According to Daniel Singer, a professor in Penn’s Philosophy department , writing your name at the top of a paper activates your grader’s implicit biases such that a white male student who writes his name on his paper gains a distinct advantage over a black female student who does the same.

“A person’s grade should not be a function of their race and gender,” said Singer, who asks his students to submit their work without writing their names anywhere on the material. When asked if this grading process makes things more difficult, he said, “With the current technology, it’s almost no burden at all.”

Most classes use Canvas, which allows students to submit work that can be traced back to their name after grading. For professors who prefer to grade on paper, student ID numbers can be used in lieu of names.

So why isn’t blind grading the universal procedure? In smaller, higher-level classes without TAs, in which students discuss paper topics with their professors prior to grading, the case can be made that such a system would be impossible.

But for classes in which implementing blind grading would be feasible, not doing so seems inexcusable. Failing to do all that we reasonably can to minimize the degree to which grades are a function of a student’s race and gender seems to me like passively condoning the advantages afforded to men over women and certain races over others. And looking at inequality in the world today, it’s clear that in aggregate, their impact is enormous.

I think we can all agree that race and gender should not determine a person’s place in the world, and that grades impact future success. Blind grading is an opportunity to increase fairness. If we’re serious about eq uality, the least we can d o is take it.

Sophia Wushanley is a College senior from Millersville, Pa., studying philosophy. Her email address is wsophia@sas.upenn.edu. “Another Look” appears every Tuesday.

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