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by michaelt 1887 days ago
When I was in school, 95% of grading was blind and nothing outside of exams was handwritten.

And while it was possible to de-anonymise, the academics were all in support of blind grading so why would they?

The only exceptions were projects where everyone was assigned a different topic, and graded presentations.

Of course, this is simpler in STEM subjects - it's not like you can guess someone's race or gender from their switching power supply design. Subjects that prize in-class participation and lengthy essays would probably be harder to blind-grade effectively.

1 comments

This also depends quite a bit on class size. If you are one of 9 profs and 36 TA's on a whole year of a 1st year intro course, you can get together and batch mark finals very effectively blind.

If you are teaching a 4th yr/masters mixed class of 11 by yourself, you pretty much get to know who is who whether you want to or not. I suppose avoiding handwriting can help if it's appropriate (e.g., won't work on a math course) but I suspect you'll know everyones style by then anyway.