Monday, 18 July 2016

Blind grading for exams isn't very blind


TL;DR:


How should I blindly grade exams when I can recognize over half of the papers by the handwriting?


Situation: I'm a TA for an first year physics class of approximately 50-60 students. Due to a complaint along the lines of "the grader hates me so I failed the class" that the department got last year, there is a proposal in the department to ensure that tests be swapped to blind grading. However, as the class assigns a fairly large amount of homework, from experience I know that I can reliably recognize more than half of the class's handwriting. The proposed system goes along the lines of having students use an ID number that they get when they take the test that isn't shown to me until I'm putting grades into the computer. The problem is that I feel that this would do very little to actually reduce bias if TAs can just recognize handwriting without a name.


Short of putting people on rotation for grading this stuff, which has its own problems, are there any better ways to implement a blind grading system to remove any handwriting bias?




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