Abstract
It has become increasingly common to endorse and implement anonymous grading as a way of promoting fairness or equality of opportunity in the classroom. The American Philosophical Association currently recommends anonymous grading, as do the Canadian Philosophical Association, the British Philosophical Association, the Society for Women in Philosophy, and Minorities and Philosophy. Despite its increasing prevalence, the practice has received surprisingly little attention in applied ethics. This paper begins filling this gap. I start by clarifying the ‘Standard Argument’ from fairness or equality of opportunity for anonymous grading. I then argue that the Standard Argument fails to support current models for anonymous grading. The issue: current models for anonymous grading are practically self-undermining if the aim is to reduce violations of equality of opportunity or fairness. So, if we want to address bias in grading because we care about equality of opportunity or fairness, we need to change how we do it.
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Notes
More specifically, names and any other markers that would allow the grader to identify the author.
Interestingly, although anonymous grading is used in other fields, professional academic associations outside of philosophy rarely endorse the practice explicitly. Although much of what I say here will be broadly relevant, I focus on academic philosophy because the professional bodies in the field (a) explicitly recommend anonymous grading and (b) tend to recommend it on common diversity, equity, and inclusion grounds. It is this kind of argument that I’m interested in here.
A notable exception is Saul (2013), who recommends anonymous grading as part of a broader package of recommendations for addressing implicit bias and stereotype threat in philosophy.
It’s worth noting that although there is little published work in philosophy on anonymous grading, the issue has received some attention in influential online forums for academic philosophy; for example, Daily Nous (Weinberg 2015), New APPS (Novaes 2013), and Feminist Philosophers (Anonymous 2012; Saul 2016).
There are other possible formalizations. I choose this one only because it is structurally simple. I expect the argument I make here to apply to any way of precisifying this kind of reasoning.
This kind of argument is sometimes offered in defense of anonymizing procedures in other contexts. See Section 4.
Although, she notes that the success of anonymizing will be context dependent (Saul 2013, 52).
Thank-you to an anonymous reviewer for this point. Note that this kind of favoritism is sometimes called ‘Halo Bias’, see: Malouff et al. (2014).
The effect was small-medium in significance and heterogeneous. Some studies found that members of the targeted groups received lower grades than their peers, some found that they received higher grades.
Interestingly, recent research suggests that this point about (e.g.) ‘brilliance’ no longer tracks to differences in letters of recommendation (Bernstein et al. 2022).
In line with clarifications in Section 1, I give only the equality of opportunity version of the argument here.
We can set aside the question of whether anonymous grading is too costly with respect some other value or is too practically onerous, or so on, because I argue that premise 2* is false on equality of opportunity grounds. If I’m right, the argument fails without appealing to these further considerations.
While it’s true that for any particular author and assignment anonymizing is a binary issue, this is often not true at the class level. By implementing anonymous grading, we may anonymize (say) fourteen out of twenty students. One might wonder whether this is better from an equality of opportunity perspective than not anonymizing at all––after all, some students were successfully anonymized. It’s worth saying a few things about this scenario. First, a situation in which some, but not all, students are anonymized produces inequalities of opportunity with respect to being anonymized itself––which might harm the anonymized or the non-anonymized depending on whether being known to the instructor is a benefit or a harm in context. Second, presumably, the students who are most likely to be de-anonymized are those who reach out for help with their work. If, as seems likely, those students tend to be members of groups that have been disadvantaged by the education system, then it looks likely that the anonymous/non-anonymous line will indicate social group membership––which is a serious concern if we’re implementing anonymous grading to reduce the effects of pernicious social biases. Finally, even if some anonymizing is better than no anonymizing, we should still ask whether we can do better with respect to equality of opportunity. This is my main concern here.
Or potentially fails to anonymize. The issue here isn’t just failure, but contingency of success.
We might wonder whether failed anonymizing is nonetheless useful in reducing the perception of bias and thus creating better teacher-student relationships. Some research suggests this isn’t the case (Pitt and Winstone 2018).
In discussing drafts of this paper, some have thought it unlikely that anyone would go to these lengths to ensure anonymized grading, given the obvious costs of doing so. There are two things I want to say about this. First, note these are the actual grading conditions that obtain at (at least) some institutions in the UK where maintaining anonymous grading is sometimes a matter of university policy. Second, I suspect that this is an intuition in favor of my general point: the inability to support students in these ways would be a very bad consequence of ensuring successful anonymous grading.
Indeed, even putting concerns about recognizing students aside, Whitelegg (2002) found that anonymous grading reduces the quality of feedback that students receive and increases the distance between teachers and students.
Thanks to David O’Brien and Fritz McDonald for pushing me on this.
Regents exams are New York State’s state-level standardized exams.
Thanks to Julia Markovits for suggesting this challenge.
There are different kinds of grading contracts. On the ‘labor-based’ grading contract students automatically get a B– (say) if they complete all coursework to a minimal standard. They achieve higher grades by completing additional tasks that would develop their (or anyone’s) learning merely by completion, e.g., redrafting a paper at a shorter length, peer reviews, summarizing additional readings, and so on (Inoue 2019). Each task is worth some number of points and the more tasks completed, the higher the eventual grade. This works well for writing development classes but may be difficult to operationalize for courses that involve specific content knowledge. See also: Elbow and Danielewicz (2008).
Thanks to an audience member at the central APA meeting in 2023 for suggesting this.
Thanks to Shaun Nichols for this suggestion.
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Acknowledgements
Particular thanks to Adriene Takaoka for getting me thinking about the value of anonymous grading. Thank you also to Julia Markovits, Harry Brighouse, Emad Atiq, Kate Manne, Dave Shoemaker, Shaun Nichols, Rachana Kamtekar, Scott MacDonald, David O’Brien, Geoff Weiss, Hannah Winckler-Olick, Timothy Kwiatek, Fran Fairbairn, Alicia Patterson, Joseph Orttung, Gus Turyn, and David Mehrle for discussing this issue with me and for comments on earlier versions. Finally, thank you to two anonymous reviewers at this journal and to audiences at the American Association of Philosophy Teachers Teaching Hub in 2021, the Northeast Philosophy of Education Society annual meeting in 2022, the American Philosophical Association central meeting in 2023, Cornell University, Hampden-Sydney College, and Colgate University for helpful questions, comments, and suggestions.
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Southgate, L. Rethinking Anonymous Grading. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 27, 237–251 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-023-10415-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-023-10415-y