- when reviewers were told the author of a legal brief was black they consistently rated identical pieces lower in quality and identified more spelling, grammar, factual, or analytical errors.
Even though this is only suggestive, it is still disturbing... I was wondering if something like this happened to me at Uni. I am white but have an arabic name, so a person that never met me in person would assume that I am brown/dark. There have been situations where lecturers would talk to me in english instead of german because they thought that I don't speak german (which was not the case)
It is suggestive, and I'd love to see the study carried out with a larger sample size and a control for reviewer harshness. The results certainly beg for that. My company used to have a division that did technical job placement. We'd interview technicians, select a subset of good candidates, and then place them at firms who were looking at temp work. Hiring organizations selecting based off of perceived gender (via name) was definitely an impression we all got. And then there were the outright racists who'd tell us that they were "all set for diversity candidates" which is racist HR-speak for "don't send us any black people." Shit like that, the study above, and just having two eyeballs are among the reasons why I still support affirmative action. It's a horribly inelegant solution to a very intractable problem, but at the end of the day I know that as a white male, I'm going to get those bonus "20 points" that a minority candidate enjoyed on their college application back when I enter the job market. I don't say that to gloat or be flippant, -it disgusts me, but it's reality.
I just remembered a lecturer we had in my first semester. He would let us choose codenames for our exams and then publish a list with those codes. I did not realize that with this simple trick he would avoid such problems, good guy (even though VERY strict)
I once had a professor who told us to select codenames (passwords, really) at the beginning of the semester and turn them in, but not why. When it became clear he was using them to mass-publish our exam grades, problems arose. Half of us had forgotten our "passwords" and half of us had used our first names.