Last semester, I studied a total of 20 hours for one class and got an A; in another class, I studied 60 hours and got a B. Here’s the thing: I was much happier with the B than the A.
Why would I be more satisfied getting a lower letter grade for 200 percent greater effort?
Not all grades are created equal. Grades are a relative function of our professors’ judgments. Ten professors can teach the same subject matter, and students will likely get a different grade from each one. That’s why Tar Heels scour sites like RateMyProfessors and Blinkness each semester at registration: to see which professors give the highest grades.
There’s an economic explanation for professor-dependent grades: unobservable error. Unobservable error, in economics, is the amount of a result that we can’t explain. While effort and intelligence explain part of our grades, they’re far from the whole story.
A host of factors affect the outcome of our grades that are not measured by effort and intelligence, which in an ideal world would be the only factors grades measure. These include having good rapport with a professor, a course’s subject matter and whether we’re distracted by a cute student sitting nearby.
Now those factors affecting grades seem fairly harmless — but what if there are further factors that affect our grades, bordering on discrimination? For example, studies have shown that one’s attractiveness and gender is correlated with the salary one receives. Are we to assume that unlike the blokes doling out salaries, professors are 100 percent impartial?
I’m not pointing fingers here — not even at one professor who had the gall to give some classmates non-A’s after spending 67 percent of his lectures ranting about politicians, never handing out rubrics for our papers, then taking two months to grade said papers.
We’re all human, after all. Nobody teaching a class can be totally impartial in grading. The solution to biased grades is not expecting our talented professors to grade like robots, but enacting grading mechanisms that account for instructors’ inevitable human fallibility.
For example, some professors require students to submit anonymous exams and papers labeled only with PIDs, eliminating the potential for student-specific grading bias.
