A new approach to exploring biases in educational assessment

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Abstract
This paper presents and illustrates an approach to the study of marking biases based on multi-sample confirmatory factor analysis. This is applied to the marks awarded by two independent markers to the final year dissertations of 197 female and 58 male psychology undergraduates. One of the two markers had supervised the work on which the dissertation was based on a one-to-one basis. The results suggest that about 30 per cent of the variance in the supervisor's mark is attributable to influences which are specific to the supervisor, orthogonal to the merit of the project as assessed by the two markers jointly, and general across each of the four marks awarded by the supervisor. The most plausible interpretation of these influences is that they represent a contamination of the supervisor's mark by personal knowledge of the student. These biases in the supervisor's marking were found to have more influence for male than for female students and to elevate the marks of males relative to those of females to a small but significant extent. It would be unwise to overgeneralize from these findings, but they demonstrate the potential value of this method of studying marking biases.

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