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This might come off rude on accident, but I mean genuinely without malice. When I'm writing an essay to submit to my professor/teacher, I am asked to make multi

This might come off rude on accident, but I mean genuinely without malice. When I'm writing an essay to submit to my professor/teacher, I am asked to make multiple drafts to get a proper end result that is ready to submit. Understanding that educational staff is already often overworked, should I expect _less_ from the person I receive my education from? If you acknowledge that many of the grades I receive are actually not fair to me, and there's an attempt to randomize the order that papers are graded, many of the grades that I received (whether high or low) were done partially (that is to say, the opposite of "impartially".) And there's a real concern that in your example where the submissions are committed to a repository that you need to shuffle, that my submission ends up in a similar position in the stack week after week, unless you're actually doing something to ensure my position in the stack is different between submissions. It's probably sufficient in many cases but doesn't guarantee randomness unless the algorithm to randomize submissions takes previous stack orderings into account.

jamiek88 2y ago
It’s simply human nature. Teachers can either lie to themselves and you about it or mitigate it. What more could you possible want from them as humans?
- starttoaster 2y ago
  I somewhat assumed there would be commenters suggesting the human angle as a retort. That's why I prefaced with both "this is what the teacher expects of me" and "understanding that educational staff is already often overworked." It just seems to me that the current systems aren't sufficient, and acknowledging that is what leads people to improving those systems. The above commentor suggested what they do in academia as workarounds to what the study showed, and I'm saying even that is not sufficient. It seems like you're agreeing with me, but jumping to their defense with "people are fallible." People are fallible, that's why we build systems to take human elements out of it. Recognizing where humanity has soured something is key to that.
advael 2y ago
I know it's not the point of your post, but I think it's worth pointing out that you're misunderstanding randomness (albeit in a very typical way). Although randomness is likely eventually (over a lot of instances) going to be the most "fair" way to distribute where your submission is in the order, it does not guarantee that it will always be different, and in fact a "random" algorithm that took previous orderings into account would be provably less random than one that didn't It's also worth noting that randomization in a context like this is inherently an imperfect solution to a problem that generally can't be solved perfectly. If we find out that weird ordering biases exist, I think randomization is done on the assumption that many we don't know about could also exist, that there's no clear way to mitigate them completely, and then randomizing the order per-instance is just the best we can do to ensure it's fair (Which, again, won't be perfect. Perfect isn't available)
- barfbagginus 2y ago
  I don't think they're misunderstanding randomness. They are claiming that randomness is not sufficient for fairness. And I agree. Adding some determinacy to the shuffling design would reduce the variance of unfair scores that students receive. Ie, it could reduce the likelihood that a student's scores will be biased by a run of advantaged or disadvantaged scoring orders. It wouldn't be very hard to design such a scheme. It would produce fairer results in the short run. And in the long run, it would converge to the same fair averages as the fully random process. In fact it would converge faster. This short run statistical efficiency matters. Students don't have access to the long run results - since they're evaluated in the short run.

jamiek88 2y ago

It’s simply human nature. Teachers can either lie to themselves and you about it or mitigate it. What more could you possible want from them as humans?

starttoaster 2y ago
I somewhat assumed there would be commenters suggesting the human angle as a retort. That's why I prefaced with both "this is what the teacher expects of me" and "understanding that educational staff is already often overworked." It just seems to me that the current systems aren't sufficient, and acknowledging that is what leads people to improving those systems. The above commentor suggested what they do in academia as workarounds to what the study showed, and I'm saying even that is not sufficient. It seems like you're agreeing with me, but jumping to their defense with "people are fallible." People are fallible, that's why we build systems to take human elements out of it. Recognizing where humanity has soured something is key to that.

advael 2y ago

I know it's not the point of your post, but I think it's worth pointing out that you're misunderstanding randomness (albeit in a very typical way). Although randomness is likely eventually (over a lot of instances) going to be the most "fair" way to distribute where your submission is in the order, it does not guarantee that it will always be different, and in fact a "random" algorithm that took previous orderings into account would be provably less random than one that didn't It's also worth noting that randomization in a context like this is inherently an imperfect solution to a problem that generally can't be solved perfectly. If we find out that weird ordering biases exist, I think randomization is done on the assumption that many we don't know about could also exist, that there's no clear way to mitigate them completely, and then randomizing the order per-instance is just the best we can do to ensure it's fair (Which, again, won't be perfect. Perfect isn't available)

barfbagginus 2y ago
I don't think they're misunderstanding randomness. They are claiming that randomness is not sufficient for fairness. And I agree. Adding some determinacy to the shuffling design would reduce the variance of unfair scores that students receive. Ie, it could reduce the likelihood that a student's scores will be biased by a run of advantaged or disadvantaged scoring orders. It wouldn't be very hard to design such a scheme. It would produce fairer results in the short run. And in the long run, it would converge to the same fair averages as the fully random process. In fact it would converge faster. This short run statistical efficiency matters. Students don't have access to the long run results - since they're evaluated in the short run.