What's in a Name? Does Racial or Gender Discrimination in Marking Exist?

Shyamal Chowdhury (), Ilya Klauzner and Robert Slonim ()
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Shyamal Chowdhury: University of Sydney
Ilya Klauzner: Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research
Robert Slonim: University of Sydney

No 13890, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We study whether racial or gender discrimination in marking exists at universities by conducting an experiment at a major Australian university where we randomly assigned names indicative of White, Chinese or Adopter identities (comprised of a White first name and Chinese surname) and male or female gender to real exam coversheets and recruited university graders to mark these exams. We find that the most economically-significant evidence of discrimination is found at grade thresholds. Exam scripts with Chinese and Adopter names are less likely than White names to receive a mark just above a grade threshold. Conversely, scripts with Chinese names receive a small marking bonus on average compared to the same script with a White name. Discrimination at grade thresholds is found to be more consistent with taste-based discrimination, whereas discrimination at the average is more consistent with statistical discrimination.

Keywords: racial discrimination; experiment; marking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 J15 J64 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49 pages
Date: 2020-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-gen
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