Compensatory Experience-based Discrimination: Behavioral Evidence from Danish School Registries

Are school teachers biased when grading students from certain groups? And if so, what is the direction of bias, and how can variation across teachers be explained? We develop an account of compensatory experience-based biases driven by a desire for grade equality and beliefs about the academic abilities of students from certain groups stemming from concrete classroom experiences. Based on large-scale longitudinal administrative data on Danish lower secondary teachers and their students, we find strong evidence for a robust and substantively large compensatory experienced-based bias. Teachers who experienced a visible demographic group (defined by gender or migration background) academically under-performing relative to a reference group show more positive bias towards that group than teachers where the same group did not under-perform. We find little evidence for alternative explanations of grading bias.