<p>over the years I have noticed that a student’s last name seems to correlate with their success in my classes. Totally unscientific but for some reason the kids at the bottom of my roll sheet tend to have a lower GPA…The sociologist in me wondered if it has something to do with seating charts which are often alphabetized and may leave the kids with names at the end of the alphabet at the back of the room. Sort of at the “back of the class” so to speak. I teach in a small rural public.</p>
<p>of course there are always the exceptions^^ The Zimmermans and the Wells are not automatically academically unsuccessful.</p>
<p>At a state-wide ceremony honoring the top 300 SAT scorers (for students in 7th grade), my S and I (to kill time) were looking at the number of awardees based on the first initial of the last name. Kids whose name started with Z were wildly overrepresented. Maybe a fluke that year?</p>
<p>My D’s name is in the second half of the alphabet and she has had only A’s since she started school at the age of 3. So I am not sure about the value of the initial. I do believe that the name of the person has an influence on their life. For example, Martin Luther King and the original Martin Luther. I did check into the meanings of names before I named my D and she has lived up to her name.</p>
<p>Daughter’s name starts with J, and she had plenty of As in high school.</p>
<p>Now my husband, whose name starts with a K, was an all-city pitcher in high school - he loved getting those Ks!</p>
<p>interesting article…correlation does not necessarily mean causality, and the authors hypothesize that some kind of ego-affinity thing causes people to somehow more favorably select outcomes (from grades to strikeouts) with the same initials as their own. Maybe this is a self-perpetuating thing where less-bright parents select D names over A names for their kids? 
Of course, I don’t know what that says about me with a Z-initialed child.</p>
<p>I suggest the authors perform a control study on a society with a totally different alphabet, like Chinese.</p>
<p>My initials are EE, which at my high school was short for “Extended Essay” (an IB requirement). My boyfriend’s initials are BF. :p</p>
<p>My son’s name starts with an A. The A’s were not as plentiful as we had hopped but thankfully my last name begins with a P. That probably explains the several AP awards he received.</p>
<p>Oh man, I wish my son (name starts with B) would have known he was supposed to get good grades! He also didn’t believe me when I told him that first born children were supposed to be high achieving perfectionists. He looked at me when I was jabbering on about that one time when he was younger and said “You’re making that up.”</p>
<p>My initials are DC and I was first in my class in high school… </p>
<p>However, I’m pretty sure I’m going to fail out of college, so there you go.</p>
<p>“Not so sure about Middlebury, Tufts, Swarthmore, Pomona, or New York University.”</p>
<p>There’s a “Pomona” in the Harry Potter books (Professor Sprout’s first name) ;)</p>
<p>The opposite results from this study held true in my family, too. But we do share a late-in-the-alphabet last name, so maybe that was my A-named sister’s downfall. For years, I’ve tried to convince my psych-student friends to look for correlations between last initial and self-esteem. I feel like a lifetime of being the last in line, the last name called, etc. has to take its toll!</p>
<p>My family’s license plate when I was applying to colleges was “JHU” and guess where I ended up? Yup, JHU. Does that count?</p>
<p>2 of our children have names that start with C. Both do well academically. The 3rd child starts with A…and was diagnosed with an LDS. On the other hand, maybe that’s why our cousin and his family all have names that begin with A!!! The return address on their last letter read, “The A Team.” :)</p>
<p>My high school participated in something like National Honor society where some top percentage of the junior class could be appointed. At a school assembly, they read out alphabetically the names of all the honored students…then stopped when they got to the Ks! There were about 20 appointed, all early in the alphabet!</p>
<p>lol</p>
<p>My Stats teacher told us about how Ice cream sales rose in the past 10 years, and so did homicides at almost the same rate. Doesn’t mean there’s a cause and effect factor involved. </p>
<p>Or maybe there is…</p>
<p>muffy- at my school, it was the opposite. All the asians with “end-of-the-alphabet” last names like Wang, Wu, Woo, Xu, Xia, Yang, Zheng, Zho, etc. were at the top of the list. hahahh</p>
<p>The article indicates that other explanations were also investigated, but no details were provided. Is one possible explanation that some names are more correlated with certain socioeconomic classes than others (I don’t have any particular names in mind, but that should at least be investigated)? The article did not seem to indicate that it looked at members of the same family with different first names. It really only seemed to talk about names, without considering anything else.</p>
<p>With respect to “JHU”, I found it somewhat humorous that a defensive back on Harvard’s current football team is named John Hopkins.</p>
<p>I love these people who say, “Oh, my name starts with a D and I have a 4.0, so that’s clearly wrong.”</p>
<p>The idea is this is a TREND, not an absolute. Geez.</p>
<p>And my name’s in the exact middle of the alphabet (M) so I’m thinking I kind of don’t apply.</p>
<p>lol. what the heck…</p>
<p>Pafather: As I recall, there’s a chapter in *Freakonomics<a href=“Steven%20Levitt,%20Stephen%20Dubner”>/i</a> devoted to names and socioeconomic class. Something about how names tend to filter downward through the classes, as I recall. I could be totally misremembering, but it was an interesting read, regardless, and you could be on to something :)</p>