Law Schools

First Monday Musings By Dean Vik Amar: Why 'Blind' Grading Prevalent At Law Schools Should Be Exported To Other Parts Of Education

Protecting students from biased assessments of their work and the work of their peers isn't the only advantage of blind grading.

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When I return to campus each January to begin the spring semester, I often compare notes with my colleagues from other units on campus about the process of grading exams the whole university has just gone through after finals in December.  Every year I do this, I am struck by the fact that the “blind” grading that is currently the norm in law school exams — in which exam booklets bear school-issued identification numbers but no names — is uncommon in American colleges, and almost unheard of in high school.  Legal education is criticized these days for many things.  To be sure, much of the criticism paints with way too broad a brush — at some law schools (including my own, I am happy to say), bar passage rates are strong and job placement rates are at historic highs — a fact often missed by media coverage that (understandably) focuses on those schools whose recent graduates confront high debt and bleak job prospects.  Equally importantly, law schools do not get the credit they deserve for the things we all do right. And blind grading is one of those practices nearly every law school makes use of that should be exported to colleges, and even high schools, because of its many advantages.

The Origins and Intuitive Appeal of Blind Grading

Some legal historians have linked the prevalence of anonymous grading in law schools to the proliferation, beginning in the 1970s, of race-based affirmative action programs in law school admissions. Interestingly enough, some of these scholars suggest that blind grading was deployed not so much to prevent discrimination against (otherwise identifiable) minority-group students, but rather to prevent faculty members who support affirmative action from affording a grading preference in favor of minority students. (This counterintuitive notion has implications for law reviews that have moved or are considering moving — for very laudable reasons — to a “blind” process for evaluating article submissions process, in which the law review editors do not know the identity of the people submitting articles for publication; in some instances, law reviews that have completely blind submissions may have a relatively harder time diversifying the ethnic/gender makeup of their authors.  And formally taking account of the race and gender of prospective authors in an otherwise blind process may violate Equal Protection/Title VI limitations.)

This history illustrates that purposeful or subconscious bias need not be driven by animus, but also can stem from positive feelings that an evaluator has towards an individual or group.  Indeed, blind grading of exams or article submissions may be just as important in preventing evaluators from rewarding “favorites” as it is in precluding evaluators from disfavoring undervalued or disliked persons or groups.  (And in a world where all grades are “relative” — whether or not a class is graded on a curve — in the sense that GPAs are compared across the student body, boosting one student’s grade is really not so different from knocking another’s down.)

Nor are the characteristics that may generate grading bias limited to immutable characteristics like race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc.  Some of the most common grading bias may involve what we may call here an “expectation effect.”  Many of us can recall teachers for whom the first graded assignment or two in a course (say, English papers) would create a perception of student ability that could then be hard to dislodge, perhaps especially in the downward direction.  (In the same way, people who publish a few pieces in top law reviews may find it easier to continue to do so, if editors assume that people who have published well in the past are likely to produce high-quality material.)

Indeed, expectation effects can be generated not just from group stereotypes or individual past performance, but also from family track records.  In K-12, when teachers often teach older and younger siblings within the same family, it is hard to avoid assessing a student’s work without memory of or reference to how well an older sibling performed in the not-so distant past.

Some Non-Obvious Benefits of Blind Grading

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Protecting students from biased assessments of their work and the work of their peers (with whom they are competing) may be the most obvious advantage of blind grading, but it is not the only one.  Protecting teachers from accusations of bias is also important.  And blind grading also gives teachers (and students) more credibility when teachers want to endorse or support students who have done well in a class for admission to higher levels of education or for jobs.  A letter of recommendation discussing a student’s excellent performance on a blindly graded exam has particular credibility, especially when there might otherwise be a reason to suspect bias by a teacher in favor of that particular student — consider, for example, students whose parents are prominent alums or donors, or students of color at a school whose faculty is known for supporting diversity.

Possible, But Ultimately Not Powerful, Limitations On Or Drawbacks To Blind Grading

One argument against blind grading is that this method makes it harder for a teacher to reward classroom participation (which, of course, is not generally anonymous).  But teachers can be (and in law schools usually are) given the power to adjust an overall course grade to reflect classroom performance after the written work has been graded blindly, and those written-work grades have been recorded.  Unblinding teachers to take classroom participation into account only after that point preserves the benefits of blind grading, and also makes transparent just how much work the evaluation of classroom performance is doing in the overall grade.

Obviously, blind grading cannot be used in classes where each student’s project is unique.  If every student is writing a paper on a different topic, and one as to which there have been consultations/approvals between the student and the teacher, then blind grading is impossible.   But most papers in high school and college, and certainly most exams at both levels, are ones in which all the students are working from the same prompts or questions.  This is true not just in humanities and social science classes, but also in math and other STEM classes. Some might think that test answers in math-type exams are either “right” or “wrong,” so that grading subjectivity is beside the point, but “partial credit” can be a somewhat idiosyncratic and contested concept.  (Of course, in any class with handwritten exams, if a grader knows a person’s handwriting from past work product, it may be useless and even dishonest to maintain a fiction of blindness.)

At the end of the day, I see no powerful reasons against using blind grading more broadly at lower education levels.  My guess as to why it is so intuitive for law professors to use blind grading (even in law schools that no longer are allowed to make use of affirmative action) is that law professors have been trained to think, and thus have developed instincts about, due process.  I would never be one to say that law schools get everything right when it comes to pedagogical matters, but blind grading is one area where I think others could learn from our example.

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Vikram David Amar Vik AmarVikram Amar is the Dean of the University of Illinois College of Law, where he also serves the Iwan Foundation Professor of Law. His primary fields of teaching and study are constitutional law, federal courts, and civil and criminal procedure. A fuller bio and CV can be found at https://www.law.illinois.edu/faculty/profile/VikramAmar, and he can be reached at amar@illinois.edu.

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