Finnish high school teachers found bias against immigrants

Finnish high school teachers discriminate against immigrant students in the assessment of matriculation examinations, according to a recent study by the Helsinki Graduate School of Economics.

The study entitled “The extent and consequences of teacher biases against immigrants” jointly conducted by Ellen Sahlström of Aalto University and Mikko Silliman, Norwegian School of Economics showed the extent and consequences of biasness against immigrants exhibited by high school teachers in Finland.

Compared to native students, immigrant students receive 0.06 standard deviation units lower scores from teachers than from blind graders.

High school exit exams in Finland are graded twice, first by teachers, and second by a randomly assigned set of centralized blind graders (termed a censor). In both cases, graders are given a rubric to base their marks on.

However, when teachers grade assignments, they see the student’s name.

When this measure is negative, students receive lower grades from their teachers than from blind graders. In contrast, when this measure is positive, teachers assign higher grades than blind graders.

Compared to native students with the same censor-assigned scores, immigrant students receive lower scores from their teachers.

The gap between teacher and censor scores is particularly large amongst high scoring students from immigrant backgrounds.

The study also said that if teacher biases extend beyond grading, exposure to biased teachers may harm immigrant students in terms of meaningful economic outcomes such as graduation or enrollment in higher education.

While the dual grading of digital end of high school exams provides the researchers with an exceptionally clean snapshot of teacher biases in the country – it is unlikely that biases towards immigrants are limited only to high school teachers.