If you go to a college with tougher grading standards than average, you’re less likely to get into graduate school, new research shows–and there’s a similar problem within the job market. Correspondence bias, a psychological phenomenon that makes us judge people based on their behavior (like GPA) while ignoring context (like the difficulty of the school attended), could be keeping you from getting the jobs you want.
A recent study by researchers at the University of California Berkeley provides evidence that the bias affects hiring and admissions practices. Until now, corresponding author Samuel A. Swift told Quartz, it’s only been observed in the lab. “It’s a psychological idea that’s been around for quite awhile,” Swift said, “and we had relatively little testing whether the phenomenon has an effect in the real world. We always have to wonder if lab studies reflect on reality, and whether people will make the same mistakes they make in the lab in real-world situations.”
To put correspondence bias to the test, Swift and his fellow researchers used actual admissions staff from US colleges in their experiment. When presented with students for admission, the counselors were more likely to select those with higher GPAs–even when they were also told how each student compared to his or her school’s average. Even if a school’s average GPA was questionably high, indicating grade inflation and poor standards, students who managed a 4.0 there were more successful applicants than those who pulled slightly lower GPAs at much tougher colleges.