Discrimination against foreign named students : a study based on a Swedish University

Sammanfattning: In this paper we investigate how anonymous exams impact the grades for foreign-named students and if there are differences in this treatment effect against them when considering the gender of the graders. By obtaining data from Stockholm University, we used a difference-in-difference model to estimate our results. Our results show that there was no negative treatment effect against foreign-named students when considering their test scores prior and after the reform of writing exams anonymously. The results are interpreted through the fact that foreign-named students received even lower test scores after the reform, meaning that the foreign-named students did not gain from the reform. Moreover it can be said that these results can be related to “reverse-bias”, which indicates that the grader is more lenient towards foreign-named students. Further, when estimating the relationship between the gender of the teacher and the treatment effect, our results showed evidence of female graders treating foreign-named students more negatively compared to male graders. This, due to the results which implied that male graders showed a strong positive treatment effect against foreign-named students, but hence a negative treatment against Swedish named students. Moreover the female graders showed a positive treatment effect against Swedish-named students and the contrary against foreign-named students.