Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

Republican and Democratic Professors Grade Differently

By Christopher Shea May 18, 2011, 3:29 PM ET

When it comes to grading, Republican and Democratic professors at one unnamed elite university put their ideologies into practice, a new study finds: Republicans welcomed inequality, handing out more very high and very low grades, and Democrats’ grades grouped more tightly around the average.

Republicans also gave black students lower grades than their colleagues. In both cases, the researchers stressed, there was no way to know which approach better reflected students’ performance.

The study looked at the grades of roughly 17,100 students, in 3,300 courses, from 417 Democratic or Republican professors, in the university’s arts and sciences division, from 2000 to 2004. Unsurprisingly, more than 90% of the teachers were Democrats. (Third-party members and independents were excluded from the study, as were professors for whom voting data could not be obtained.)

The distribution of academic talent was the same across “Republican” and “Democratic” classrooms, judging from SAT scores. But the Republicans gave grades of C-minus or worse 6.2% of the time, compared with 4% for Democrats. And Republicans awarded the gold star of A-plus 8% of the time, compared with only 3.5% for Democrats.

On average, Republican professors gave black students grades that were .2 of a grade point lower than their Democratic colleagues, or about two-thirds of the distance between a B and a B-minus.

(Among eleven black professors in the sample, there were no Republicans, and the Democrats appeared to grade white and black students as their white-Democratic peers did. But there were too few black professors to make that finding statistically significant.)

On other demographic fronts, older professors were slightly more likely than their younger peers to give A-pluses. Women gave A-pluses to female students slightly more often than men did, and women were also more egalitarian at the bottom end of the grading curve.

As universities crack down on grade inflation, with mixed success, they may also want to consider making it harder for professors to use “student characteristics” as a factor in grading, the authors argued.

Source: “Partisan Grading,” Talia Bar and Asaf Zussman, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics (forthcoming) [ http://www.aeaweb.org/aej-applied/accepted_single.php?id=678&jrnl=app ]

http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/05/18/republican-and-democratic-professors-grade-differently/

,,,,,Isn't that just like them? . .YEAH .. they would have failed Obama .. that Black Kenyan . .WHO DOES HE THINK HE IS ?