Economists Talia Bar (Cornell) and Asaf Zussman (Hebrew University) studied grading tendencies of Republican and Democratic college professors..
Their results are reported in a forthcoming American Economic Journal article titled “Partisan Grading“.
The highlights:
The evidence suggests that student grades are linked to the political orientation of professors: relative to their Democratic colleagues, Republican professors are associated with a less egalitarian distribution of grades.
That is, the variance of grades is higher in courses taught by Republicans than in courses taught by Democrats. Moreover, in additional analysis we find that relative to their Democratic colleagues, Republican professors tend to assign more very low and very high grades
The differences are highly statistically significant.
The observed pattern is consistent with the hypothesis that Republican professors are associated with … higher returns to student ability.
The results suggest that the allocation of grades is associated with the worldview or ideology of professors.
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Economist Mark Perry observes: One conclusion here might be that highly motivated, high-achieving students should prefer classes from Republican professors because it’s more likely they’ll be rewarded with a really high grade
… and less motivated, lower-achieving students should prefer classes from Democratic professors, because it’s less likely that they’ll receive a really low grade.
