Bad news for Walkers, Youngs and Zimmermans! Students with last names that occur later in the alphabet receive lower grades, research shows
- Students with a last name further down the alphabet receive lower grades
- Teachers can become more irritable as they progress through the alphabet
If you regularly get low grades in school, there’s good news: it may not have been a reflection of your intelligence.
Instead, a new study suggests that your last name may be to blame.
Researchers at the University of Michigan say students with last names later in the alphabet receive lower grades.
Moreover, according to the researchers, these students more often receive rude comments about their work.
βThis could be something that happened unconsciously by the raters and actually creates a real social impact,β said Helen Wang, co-author of the study.
If you regularly get low grades in school, there’s good news: it may not have been a reflection of your intelligence. Instead, a new study suggests your last name may be to blame (stock image)
In the study, the team analyzed more than 30 million student assessment data at the University of Michigan.
The assignments were submitted via Canvas β the most widely used online learning management system in the world.
Importantly, Canvas communicates these papers to teachers by default so they can be graded in alphabetical order.
The team’s analysis revealed a clear pattern of a decline in assessment quality as teachers evaluated more assignments.
Students whose last names started with A, B, C, D or E received a 0.3 point higher grade out of 100 possible points, compared to when they were randomly graded.
The reason for the findings remains unclear, although the researchers suggest that teachers may become more tired and irritable as they progress through the alphabet (stock image)
In contrast, students whose last names began with letters later in the alphabet received a 0.3 point lower grade.
While this 0.6 point difference may sound small, the researchers say that this difference could affect students’ grade point averages over time β and suggest it could even influence their future career paths.
The reason for the findings remains unclear, although the researchers suggest that teachers may become more tired and irritable as they progress through the alphabet.
“We suspect that fatigue is one of the main factors causing this effect,” said Jiaxin Pei, co-author of the study.
‘If you work on something for a long time, you get tired, you lose attention and your cognitive skills deteriorate.’
Based on the findings, the researchers suggest that teachers should aim to grade assignments in any order.
And for larger institutions, they believe more raters should be hired to avoid rating fatigue.