"Male students ask for more grade changes than female students" | Is this finding accurate or false?

Masterchefpetyofficr · 2020-08-10T19:51:19+00:00

Considering boys are more likely to be given incorrect grades due to teacher bias, I wouldn’t say it’s objectively false

Strikester101 · 2020-08-10T19:24:41+00:00

OK, let me preface this: I don't know whether this study is legit or not. I want to see your guys'/gals' opinions on this study.

I would say, are boys +18% more likely to ask for grade changes? Or is it like, e.g 5.9% of boys ask for grade change, compared to 5% of girls?

genkernels · 2020-08-11T07:09:25+00:00

This study is interesting because it tries to control for lots of variables, because it needs to.

We find that the upward grade changes were near zero when the student’s performance in a given class was better than her average performance in other classes. However, when the student’s grade in a class is below her average GPA, the propensity to receive an upward grade correction increases in the difference between the GPA and the class grade. Approximately 28-percent of administrative records were from large classes (i.e., classes of more than 90 students) where grade changes occurred 0.45 percent of the time, compared with 0.47 percent for the remaining classes

Column 1 shows that the raw gender difference (that is, the estimate without any controls) in upward grade change is 0.0748 percentage points. This raw gender difference implies that the male-to-female odds ratio of a favorable regrade outcome is 1.186 (reported in square brackets in the table). In other words, for a male, the odds of receiving an upward grade change are 1.186 times as large as the odds for a female receiving such an outcome.10Controlling for students’ characteristics (i.e., initial grade, GPA, and class standing) that are unequal across gender (e.g., females tend to have higher grades and GPA and shorter time-to-graduation than males), Column 2 shows that the gender gap reduces to 0.0665 percentage points. In Column 3, controlling for class characteristics (i.e.,colleges and departments in which the courses were offered, and the instructors’ gender and rank) reduces the gender gap to 0.0685 percentage points which is mainly attributable to the differential rates of grade changes by departments and students’ gender-sorting into different majors

...The gender gap remains significant at the value of 0.0829 percentage points from the logit model in Column 2. We then remove students who received multiple upward regrades from the analysis. We find that the gender gap reduces but remains substantial at 0.0583 percentage points in Column 3 of Panel A.

...If male class enrollment is correlated with instructor leniency in regrades (e.g., throughknowledge of instructor reputation), a concern may be that gender differences in regrades aredriven by a handful of instructors who make frequent grade changes. Column 4 of Panel A inTable 3 examines the sensitivity of the result by removing observations if the instructor mademore than 10 percent changes in grades; we see the exclusion explains little of the genderdifference (i.e., the gender difference reduces slightly from 0.0698 to 0.0565 percentage pointsand remains significant).

Good on them for doing so. They also got a large data set so they could do all of this filtering and still have the raw numbers to draw conclusions. However, I'm largely suspicious of this sort of thing as I feel it tends to fall into the wage gap trap of finding out that all of the little demographic differences matter and ultimately fully explain the discrepancy.

For instance, female students took half of their classes from female instructors,while male students took classes from female instructors only 38.9 percent of the time –potentially due to gender sorting into different college majors where the gender distribution of instructors is also uneven.

Apparently men's advantage in grade changes seems largely about men appealing to male instructors. My suspicion is that this is mainly for grades that are manifestly unfair (for instance, another student receiving a better grade for similar work) and that it is primarily male students partially due to social differences that result in men actively viewing other people's work. I suspect over 50% of the discrepancy, however, is due to the differences in student major choice in some manner.

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The study continues with a survey to add on to what they found with their first data set (note that 0.08 percentage points of gender gap is roughly a 20% relative advantage, so the 18.6 number is not the lowest number they found in their analysis for controlling variables):

The survey data reveal that (1) regrade requests are very prevalent, and (2) while there is little gender difference in asking on the extensive margin, males are significantly more likely to ask on the intensive margin; using the three different measures (the number ofclasses considered for regrades, the number of classes reported for regrade requests, andthe imputed number of classes of regrade requests), we see that males request (or consider requesting) about 16 to 25 percent more than females do. Interestingly, the magnitude issimilar to the evidence from the administrative records where male students are 18.6 percent more likely than their female counterparts to receive favorable regrade outcomes

As far as perceptions are concerned, it does not seem that the two genders differ in terms of how they believe their requests would be treated. However, female students report a significantly higher stress level than males do for having to ask the instructor for a grade change

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The study even continues with a lab experiment that concurs that men ask more for regrades. This seems like really solid work.

Title	"Male students ask for more grade changes than female students" \| Is this finding accurate or false?
Author	Strikester101
Upvotes	4
Comments	19
Date	August 10, 2020 7:21 PM UTC (6 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/i7bjx2/male_students_ask_for_more_grade_changes_than/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/male-students-ask-for-more-grade-changes-than.1062992 https://theredarchive.com/post/1062992

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