VIKRAM DAVID AMAR
Two activities that occupy a lot of time for law professors during the winter break are grading exams and visiting with family and friends —including high-school-age kids, and college students who are home for the holidays. As I was doing both of these things (in turn, not simultaneously) over the last month, it struck me that the “blind” grading that is currently the norm in law school exams—in which exams have school-issued identification numbers but no names on them—is uncommon in American colleges (or at least at the research universities from which the recent college students I know and teach come from), and almost unheard of in high school. In the space below, I briefly discuss the great advantages (and occasional disadvantages) of blind grading, and suggest that colleges and even high schools consider making wider use of it.
The Origins and Intuitive Appeal of Law School Blind Grading
Some legal historians have linked the prevalence of anonymous grading in law schools to the proliferation, beginning in the 1970s, of race-based affirmative action programs in law school admissions. Interestingly enough, some of these scholars suggest that blind grading was deployed not so much to prevent discrimination against (otherwise identifiable) minority-group students, but rather to prevent faculty members who support affirmative action from affording a grading preference in favor of minority students. This counterintuitive notion points up the fact that purposeful or subconscious bias need not be driven by animus, but also can stem from positive feelings that a grader has towards an individual or group. Indeed, blind grading may be just as important in preventing teachers from rewarding “favorites” as it is in precluding graders from punishing “troublemakers.” (And in a world where all grades are “relative”—whether or not a class is graded on a curve—in the sense that GPAs are compared across the student body, boosting one student’s grade is really not so different than knocking another’s down.)
- See more at:
http://verdict.justia.com/2014/01/17/blind-grading-makes-good-sense-used-extensively-outside-context-law-school-exams?utm_source=Justia+Law&utm_campaign=f8ce7dca23-summary_newsletters_jurisdictions&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_92aabbfa32-f8ce7dca23-406021093#sthash.AJv9vB6F.dpuf
