Navigating Biases: Who Determines Educational Assessment Outcomes?

Every time a teacher picks up a pen to grade a student’s essay or mark an oral presentation, a seemingly simple act is taking place. But look closer, and the question becomes more complicated: who is truly determining that mark – the criteria on the rubric, or the person holding the pen? Who applies the assessment criteria, and how much do their own perceptions, emotions, and unconscious assumptions shape the final outcome? These are not abstract questions. They sit at the center of how fair, how accurate, and how equitable educational assessment actually is in practice.

The gap between criteria and judgment 🔗

In most educational settings, teachers are given a set of assessment criteria – often in the form of rubrics – designed to ensure consistency and objectivity. These tools are meant to guide grading so that two different teachers marking the same piece of work arrive at a similar result. In principle, the criteria do the deciding. In practice, the teacher still interprets them.

As Kappan Online notes, all human judgment is inherently subjective – grades rely on criteria that are almost always shaped by the individual instructor’s own values, beliefs about feedback, and perspectives on learning. The real question, as assessment scholar Grant Wiggins framed it, is not whether grading is subjective, but whether it is credible and defensible.

This distinction matters enormously. Subjectivity is not the same as bias. A teacher brings professional expertise, contextual knowledge, and nuanced understanding to an assessment – things no automated system can fully replicate. But subjectivity becomes a problem when it slides into inconsistency, favoritism, or discrimination. Research published in The Conversation identifies four key factors that shape teachers’ judgments: their beliefs about the purpose of assessment, the level of support they provide students, their emotional state during marking, and their confidence in the marking criteria themselves. Each of these can push grading off course – sometimes without the teacher even realizing it.

How bias enters the grading process 🔗

Bias in educational assessment is not always conscious or deliberate. It can seep in through assumptions teachers make about individual students, through the emotional dynamics of a classroom, or through the structural limitations of assessment design itself.

Gender, race, and socioeconomic bias 🔗

A study published in Frontiers in Education found that pre-service and in-service teachers graded students with a migration background worse than students without one, even when the submitted work was identical. This bias appeared across subjects – not just in language-based assessments, but in mathematics too. Similarly, research in Social Psychology of Education found that socioeconomic status (SES) biases were most likely to appear when a student’s work was below average – with markers tending to favor students from more affluent, white backgrounds, particularly when they were under high cognitive load (such as when grading large stacks of papers under time pressure).

All Things Assessment explains how internalized racial biases can activate stereotypes, leading teachers to apply discriminatory performance evaluations without realizing it. When a teacher unconsciously subscribes to the assumption that certain student groups are less academically capable, those assumptions can distort grading – not through deliberate unfairness, but through the silent operation of implicit bias.

Behavioral and emotional bias 🔗

Bias doesn’t only stem from student demographics. It also stems from classroom behavior and the teacher-student relationship. A large-scale study using data from over 23,000 students across private schools in Brazil, published in ScienceDirect, found clear evidence that teachers factor classroom behavior into achievement grades – even when official guidelines explicitly forbid it. Students who were perceived as disruptive received lower test scores compared to their equally performing well-behaved peers. The researchers concluded that teachers were using grades – consciously or not – to reward desired behavior and penalize unwanted behavior, creating a significant distortion in what grades are supposed to measure.

Emotion plays a role too. According to The Conversation, if a teacher becomes frustrated during a face-to-face performance assessment – perhaps perceiving a student as disrespectful – that frustration can overshadow the student’s actual demonstrated ability. The emotional temperature of the assessment moment can become a hidden variable in the final grade.

Participation grades and subjective categories 🔗

One of the most structurally embedded sources of bias is the common practice of grading “participation” or “effort.” As Joe Feldman argues in a discussion of his book Grading for Equity, most participation grades reflect the teacher’s subjective evaluation of student behaviors – judgments that are inevitably filtered through the teacher’s own cultural lens and implicit biases. A student who challenges the teacher verbally may be marked down for “attitude” while a quieter student – regardless of depth of understanding – may be rewarded for compliance.

The limits of rubrics 🔗

The standard institutional response to grading bias is the rubric. Well-designed rubrics do help. Research from Frontiers in Education shows that when teachers used a detailed rubric rather than a vague grading scale to assess a writing sample, racial bias disappeared from their grading. The specificity of the criteria essentially anchored the teacher’s judgment to the work itself rather than to assumptions about the student.

However, rubrics are not a complete solution. A comprehensive review of rubric research highlights that untrained teachers may simply use rubrics to justify assessments they had already made intuitively – applying criteria after the fact rather than letting them guide the process. Without proper training, rubrics can create a veneer of objectivity without actually delivering it. The Conversation further notes that when teachers distrust the criteria they’ve been given – perhaps because they find them vague or incomplete – they tend to deviate from them, adding their own implicit standards. The result is that different students end up being assessed against different criteria, depending on which teacher is marking their work.

This is why moderation – the structured practice of having multiple assessors discuss and compare their judgments – is increasingly recognized as essential. Kappan Online points to jurisdictions like New Zealand, Scotland, and Queensland, Australia, where moderation is a required and resourced part of teaching practice. The goal is not to eliminate individual teacher judgment, but to develop consistency through shared professional dialogue.

Moving toward fairer, more inclusive assessment 🔗

Addressing bias in grading is not simply about tightening rubrics. It requires a systemic rethinking of who has power in the assessment process, and how that process can be made more transparent and equitable for all students.

Transparent criteria shared with students 🔗

Times Higher Education argues that transparent assessment design – where criteria are clearly explained and unpacked with students before they begin a task – is central to inclusive assessment. When students understand how their work will be judged, they can focus on demonstrating their learning rather than trying to decode the teacher’s expectations. This is especially important for students who are new to a particular academic culture or whose previous schooling has not prepared them for dominant academic conventions.

The Georgetown University Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship notes that being explicit about goals and assessment criteria not only reduces student anxiety and promotes equal treatment – it also forces the teacher to become clearer on what they are actually measuring. That self-clarity alone can reduce the drift toward implicit bias.

Diversifying assessment methods 🔗

Relying on a single assessment type – say, a timed written exam – systematically disadvantages students whose strengths lie elsewhere, or whose cultural and linguistic backgrounds make that format harder to navigate. Oxford’s Centre for Teaching and Learning emphasizes that no single assessment can capture the full extent of what a student knows and can do. Offering a range of formats – essays, oral presentations, portfolios, projects – gives more students genuine opportunities to demonstrate their learning. Crucially, inclusive assessment is not about lowering standards; it’s about removing barriers that prevent students from reaching them.

Involving students in the assessment process 🔗

Peer assessment and self-assessment are increasingly recognized not just as learning tools, but as equity tools. All Things Assessment recommends that teachers “democratize the grading process” – involving students in self-evaluation, using learning evidence instead of points, and shifting toward a skills-focused curriculum that centers what students can do rather than compliance with teacher expectations.

Imperial College London’s teaching framework suggests building peer and self-assessment into coursework at the draft stage – not just at the point of final submission. When students can assess their own work against shared criteria before submitting it, they develop greater ownership of their learning, and the assessment process becomes a two-way dialogue rather than a one-way verdict.

Teacher training and reflective practice 🔗

Awareness is the starting point. The Conversation suggests that providing teachers with regular feedback on their own marking behavior creates a meaningful learning opportunity – helping them identify patterns they may not have noticed. When grading becomes a reflective practice rather than an administrative task, teachers are more likely to catch and correct bias before it shapes a student’s record.

The three-step framework proposed in The Clinical Teacher – Name, Reframe, and Check-in – offers a practical model: first, acknowledge that bias exists in assessment; second, reframe assessment language to make the assessor’s subjectivity visible; and third, check in with the learner to ensure the assessment has been understood and is opening a dialogue rather than closing one down. This approach repositions assessment from a judgment passed on a student to a conversation held with one.

The question of who should decide 🔗

Ultimately, the question “who will apply the assessment criteria and determine marks or grades?” does not have a clean answer. Teachers will always be part of the process – and that is not a problem in itself. Professional judgment, when informed, reflective, and accountable, is a strength of classroom assessment. What is a problem is when that judgment goes unchecked, unexamined, and unchallenged by either the student or the institution.

The solution is not to remove the human element from assessment, but to structure it so that individual bias has less room to operate – through clearer criteria, collaborative moderation, diverse assessment formats, genuine student involvement, and ongoing professional reflection. As Kappan Online puts it, the goal should not be the elimination of subjectivity but the development of consistency. Assessment, at its best, is not a verdict – it is evidence of learning, gathered carefully and interpreted responsibly.

What do you think? If students were given a clearer understanding of how their work will be assessed before they begin – and even involved in setting some of the criteria – do you think this would reduce grading bias and improve learning outcomes? And in your own experience, what role does teacher training play in making assessment more equitable?

References

1. https://kappanonline.org/busting-myths-about-professional-judgment-and-subjectivity-in-assessment/
2. https://theconversation.com/four-things-that-can-bias-how-teachers-assess-student-work-142135
3. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/education/articles/10.3389/feduc.2024.1386016/full
4. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11218-023-09882-z
5. https://allthingsassessment.info/2021/03/11/uncovering-implicit-bias-in-assessment-feedback-and-grading/
6. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S004727272200175X
7. https://greatschoolvoices.org/2018/11/way-grade-students-biased-unsound-conversation-grading-equity/
8. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/384355220_A_Review_of_Rubrics_in_Education_Potential_and_Challenges
9. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/how-make-higher-education-assessments-inclusive
10. https://cndls.georgetown.edu/resources/inclusive-assessment/
11. https://www.ctl.ox.ac.uk/included-designing-inclusive-assessments
12. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/staff/educational-development/teaching-toolkit/inclusive-learning-and-teaching/making-assessment-and-feedback-inclusive/
13. https://clime.washington.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/The-Clinical-Teacher-2021-Fainstad-Bias-in-assessment-name-reframe-and-check-in.pdf