Partisan Grading

Talia Bar and Asaf Zussman (AEJ:AE, 2012) have just published a rather controversial result.

We study grading outcomes associated with professors in an elite university in the United States who were identified—using voter registration records from the county where the university is located—as either Republicans or Democrats. The evidence suggests that student grades are linked to the political orientation of professors. Relative to their Democratic colleagues, Republican professors are associated with a less egalitarian distribution of grades and with lower grades awarded to black students relative to whites.