What’s in a Name? Rethinking Bias in Grading

Anonymous grading is often proposed as a way to reduce bias and make assessment feel fairer to students. But does hiding student identities actually change grades, perceptions of fairness, anxiety, or students’ willingness to take academic risks?

In this Analytics Community of Practice (CoP) session, Neha Raikar, Professor in Chemical, Biochemical and Environmental Engineering, will share her Analytics Mini Grant project examining the impact of anonymous grading in an introductory engineering course. Her study explores how grading with and without student names affects both academic outcomes and students’ experiences with assessment.

Using assignments and quizzes graded under anonymous and non-anonymous conditions, along with pre- and post-assessment student surveys, the project examines whether anonymity can reduce real or perceived grading bias, lower anxiety, increase confidence, and encourage students to remain engaged in their coursework.

What the study attempts to answer

• Bias, Fairness & Grading: Whether removing identifying information from student work changes grades or students’ perceptions of grading bias and fairness.

• Does Assessment Type Matter? How the effects of anonymous grading may differ across auto-graded and instructor-graded work, including multiple-choice and free-response assessments.

• The Student Experience: Whether anonymity affects anxiety, confidence, willingness to take academic risks, engagement, and persistence.

• Putting Anonymous Grading Into Practice: What the approach requires from instructors, including considerations around rubrics, grading consistency, workload, and the potential return on that additional effort.

• Unintended Consequences: Whether anonymous grading increases faculty workload, reduces personalized feedback and useful student context, or introduces new administrative, accessibility, and pedagogical challenges. 

Whether you teach, support faculty, study student success, or are interested in using course data to evaluate teaching practices, join us on Thursday, October 15 for a data-informed look at what happens when we take the student’s name out of the grading process.