Republican Profs Award More High and Low Grades Than Democratic Profs

Talia Bar & Asaf Zussman:

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.