My awesome colleague Rachel Forsyth (of our amazing “trust” paper) sent me a message saying “unsurprising but important research” and then a link to Wang et al. (2024), and that is a good summary. In a study of more than 30 million grading records in a Learning Management System, Wang et al. (2024) find that students with surnames later in the alphabet (and thus graded later in the sequence) a) get lower grades, b) get more negative and impolite comments, and c) are complaining more about their grades to the relevant authority. This happens across subjects, and accumulates for students in such a way that it shows up in final grades and can thus potentially even influence job opportunities. So what should we do?

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An argument that I encounter a lot is that student assignments need to be graded in order for students to put in any effort at all. But is that true? In the literature, grades have been connected to stress and anxiety for students, more cheating, less cooperation, less thinking, less trust — so ultimately less learning. So what does grading student work do for student motivation? My summary of Chamberlin et al. (2023) below.

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