This is somewhat funny because many of my classes in school barely even managed a veneer of objectivity in scoring, and grades for many things were far more opaque than any annual review I've had at my job.
- In general any class with subjective grading where the work was not anonymized, the name on top would affect the grade (sometimes significantly).
- Some friends actually did an experiment once; person A said that the instructor was grading them harshly because they didn't like them. Person B said "surely not, maybe they just don't like your writing style." So they wrote papers and swapped their names. The paper written by person A, but with person B's name on it got an A, the other got a B-.
- The most extreme case of this was when I pissed off my instructor and she took me aside and informed me that regardless of the quality of work I turned in, I would not be getting a grade higher than a C on any assignment, and I should expect a D for the class. In retrospect, I think the instructor was trying to get me to drop her class, but I was a freshman and didn't realize that was something you could do 4 weeks into the semester and I ended up with a D.
- I once had a paper returned scored "56/100" the only comments on the paper were "Great Job!! Almost an A paper!" The cutoff for a passing grade in that class was 60%.
Yeah the idea i that school is somehow a bastion of meritocracy is misguided.
Academia is better at setting clear requirements and measuring those goals, but whether these requirements have anything to do with being successful or useful in the real world is an entirely different matter.
School isn't reality, its mostly not even trying to simulate reality. School breads a lot of "Why was I not rewarded? I did everything they said i should do" disappointment in the real world.
I've read that male instructors are expected to be more objective, and that female instructors are rated more poorly when they are more objective (https://gap.hks.harvard.edu/what%E2%80%99s-name-exposing-gen...) but not anything on the rates of objectivity itself
- In general any class with subjective grading where the work was not anonymized, the name on top would affect the grade (sometimes significantly).
- Some friends actually did an experiment once; person A said that the instructor was grading them harshly because they didn't like them. Person B said "surely not, maybe they just don't like your writing style." So they wrote papers and swapped their names. The paper written by person A, but with person B's name on it got an A, the other got a B-.
- The most extreme case of this was when I pissed off my instructor and she took me aside and informed me that regardless of the quality of work I turned in, I would not be getting a grade higher than a C on any assignment, and I should expect a D for the class. In retrospect, I think the instructor was trying to get me to drop her class, but I was a freshman and didn't realize that was something you could do 4 weeks into the semester and I ended up with a D.
- I once had a paper returned scored "56/100" the only comments on the paper were "Great Job!! Almost an A paper!" The cutoff for a passing grade in that class was 60%.