Do Teachers Have In-group Bias on the Basis of Student’s Caste and Socio-economic Status in India

This paper studies the extent of teacher’s in-group bias in occupational expectations and grading on basis of student’s caste and socioeconomic status. The paper adopts an experimental approach and draws on data generated from 122 teachers from 19 schools in Delhi, India. Student’s caste and socio-economic status were randomly assigned to a set of essays written by students such that the assigned characteristics were not related to essay quality. The results show that high caste teachers hold higher occupational expectations from their in-group category and biased against low caste category. For instance, high caste teachers assign 0.53% or 0.019 points higher occupational expectations to high caste students and assign 5.6% or 0.19 points lower occupational expectations to low caste students. The magnitude of coefficients is small but significant at 5% level (P value

Caste · Grading (engineering · Occupational prestige · Set (abstract data type · Socioeconomic status · Innovations in Educational Methods · Psychometric Methodologies and Testing · School Choice and Performance