In addition, these factors add up. This means that students with multiple “intersectional identities” received significantly worse grades than their classmates, regardless of their true abilities. Richard Nennstiel and Sandra Gilgen from the University of Bern and the University of Zurich in Switzerland presented these results on Wednesday in the journal “Plos One”.
The results of the study cannot be transferred to Switzerland without further ado, said Nennstiel when asked by Keystone-SDA. However, an earlier study in Switzerland showed similar trends for language grades as in Germany for gender, social origin and migration background.
Representative sample
To investigate whether students suffer from bias in their school grades, Nennstiel and Gilgen used data from the National Educational Panel Study in Germany. They focused on a representative sample of 14,090 students who attended ninth grade in 2010.
Nennstiel and Gilgen compared school teachers’ grades with results from standardized competency tests to find out whether some adolescents had an advantage over others. The scientists examined the effects of gender, body mass index (BMI), parents’ socioeconomic status (SES), and ethnic background.
Gender bias
A gender bias was evident in the grades awarded by teachers in all subjects except chemistry. According to the study, girls had an advantage in German, mathematics and biology. Boys benefited in physics. Higher BMIs were associated with significantly worse grades from teachers in every subject, while students with a higher parental SES had better grades.
A boy with a high BMI from a minority background with a low SES received, on average, worse grades than a girl born in Germany with a low BMI from a higher SES, regardless of his actual abilities.
