Even teachers with really strong internal biases don't actually give lower grades to students based on their race or gender.
April 10, 2026
Original Paper
Fairness in grading: Randomizing Ethnicity and Gender in Teacher Assessments
SSRN · 6545376
The Takeaway
While we often hear that systemic bias ruins grading, this study found that teachers were surprisingly fair when assessing work. Even those with subconscious prejudices didn't let those feelings leak into the actual marks they gave students.
From the abstract
We investigate the impact of ethnicity and gender on teacher assessments through a randomized controlled experiment involving 203 teachers grading a single class’s assignments. Within teachers we randomly assigned names, signaling gender and ethnicity, with a control group grading anonymized assignments. We find no statistically significant evidence of grading bias based on student name, ethnicity or gender, unlike previous studies. This holds even among teachers with stronger implicit biases. H