<p>Say that essay reader A is grading papers from a rather prestigious neighborhood with a well-endowed school district, where 99% of the students have received private tutoring. Essay reader B is grading papers from a less wealthy neighborhood. Are essays grouped by location/district/school…or are they “jumbled”? If a stack of papers from one school is sent to a specific group of readers, won’t it be hard for that reader to fully gage the spectrum of student capability, when they are repeatedly grading 6 papers…? Does anyone understand my concern, and is it at all valid? Or am I just being paranoid?</p>
<p>lol… slightly paranoid IMO. college admissions are always going to be luck to an extent and some bias on the part of adcoms is inevitable. the best a college can do is try to hire diverse adcoms, which would in theory equal diverse “subconcious biases”.</p>
<p>Essays are all scanned and then read on-line. Papers are scrambled so that any one reader probably will not read two in a row from the same school. </p>
<p>The essay books in the AP Programs are physically scrambled for the same reason, though a single packet of books may contain several from one school.</p>
<p>No one is sure whether your concern is valid or not, but by scrambling the essays the issue won’t come up.</p>