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Discrimination in grading: experimental evidence from primary school teachers

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Abstract

This paper studies the effect of teacher expectations on essay grades in an experimental setting. For this purpose, we randomly assign Turkish or German first names to a set of essays so that some teachers believe a given essay was written by a German native pupil, whereas others believe it was written by a pupil of Turkish origin. We find that the same essays obtain significantly worse grades and lower secondary school recommendations when bearing a Turkish sounding name.

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Correspondence to Maresa Sprietsma.

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Sprietsma, M. Discrimination in grading: experimental evidence from primary school teachers. Empir Econ 45, 523–538 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-012-0609-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-012-0609-x

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