Providing fair grading
A law student with a Moroccan background was afraid to write an assignment about repatriating children born to Dutch members of the Islamic State as she was concerned her opinions and choice of topic would be linked to her ethnicity and even negatively affect her grade.
Consciously or unconsciously, teachers might grade students differently based on who they are Montenegro, E., & Jankowski, N. A. (2017). Equity and assessment: Moving towards culturally responsive assessment. Occasional Paper, 29. . Implicit bias refers to unconscious attitudes, reactions, stereotypes, and categories that affect behaviour and understanding Gonzalez, C. M., Lypson, M. L., & Sukhera, J. (2021). Twelve tips for teaching implicit bias recognition and management. Medical Teacher, 43(12), 1368-1373 . Implicit bias becomes visible in various ways, for instance, by making certain assumptions about your students based on their race or socio-economic status (for more information please read Challenging your own bias in Role of the teacher). A positive feedback bias has been identified whereby teachers give more praise and less criticism to students coming from minority backgrounds than to students with a majority background Harber, K. D., Gorman, J. L., Gengaro, F. P., Butisingh, S., Tsang, W., & Ouellette, R. (2012). Students' race and teachers' social support affect the positive feedback bias in public schools. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104(4), 1149. . This is problematic in many ways as it can undermine students’ academic achievement and signal differential expectations Harber, K. D., Gorman, J. L., Gengaro, F. P., Butisingh, S., Tsang, W., & Ouellette, R. (2012). Students' race and teachers' social support affect the positive feedback bias in public schools. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104(4), 1149. . It is therefore important that a students’ identity and opinions do not have an influence on their grade.
Tools
Implicit bias
To prevent students’ identity or opinions from influencing your assessment of their work, you can take the following steps:
- Grade students anonymously (i.e., by student number only) on exams and papers
- Have another teacher in the course who does not know your student grade their assessment (ie for presentations)
- Use multiple assessors and/or assessments to promote objectivity and fairness in grading.
- Use a rubric when grading (more information on this can be found in designing equitable assessment)
Language
For courses taught in English, the majority of students will be assessed in their second (or even third or fourth) language. Also for courses taught in Dutch, some students may be working in their second or third language. It is therefore important to develop strategies for balancing the relative importance of language and content when grading. These need to be reflected in the stated assessment criteria. Some of these strategies are described below:
- Read quickly, looking for the ideas and underpinning structure, instead of getting caught up with aspects of secondary significance such as grammatical errors Higher Education Academy . (2014) Assessment and feedback .
- Decide in advance of an assessment how important accurate language is and allocate a specific percentage of marks for this aspect and communicate this to students.
- Make sure that all assessors agree on the importance and relative weighting of accurate language and expression in a particular assessment.
- Consider the level of language development appropriate for that point in the programme.
- Consider whether you could accept answers to exam questions in several different forms.
Additional Resources
Taking exams in a second language: Sitting exams in a second language minimising bias maximising potential – Oxford Brookes University
Webinar on equitable assessment practices: Webinar: Diversity, Equity, and Assessment – YouTube
