A strange study out this week suggests that students whose names begin with the letter A are more likely to get A grades than those whose names start with D. We’re more likely to get Ds apparently. This is of course generating “what’s in a name?” news coverage from USA Today, UPI, Vancouver Sun, plus a good piece on Newsweek.

Leif Nelson at the University of California, San Diego and colleague Joseph Simmons from Yale University, reviewed grade point averages for MBA students at an unspecified private American university. They found students named Carl or Daniel, for instance, had lower averages than those such as Adrian or Boris, “presumably because of an unconscious fondness for these letters”, says the press release. Nelson and Simmons also looked at baseball players and found a higher strikeout rate from players whose names began with a ‘K’, the letter which is used to record a strikeout.

So far so hokey – finding random correlations in data is always possible. My office has a Geoff Brumfiel who recently moved to Great Britain. If I go on holiday to Washington DC next year maybe we’ll have a trend. But Nelson and Simmons also did a laboratory test…

They asked study participants to solve anagrams, some of which were not really anagrams as they had no solutions. Participants had to click a button to indicate they were done with the task, either an ‘I have solved all these’ button or an ‘I have not solved all these’ button. The former had an over $100 prize, the latter an under $100 prize. Obviously those clicking the first button were lying. But Nelson and Simmons also found that attaching a participant’s initial to the ‘I have failed’ button (eg – press button D if you have failed) made performance worse. “As predicted, when the prize for failure matched participants’ first initial, participants performed especially poorly on the anagram task,” they report.

There was no improved performance seen when A and B named individuals were compared to those without grade relevant names, which seems slightly suspicious. Also the study only seems to have looked at A to D grades. Whether or not this holds up if you look at examinations that grade right down to F remains to be seen. It’s also not clear what happens to the Andy Denvers and Bob Crows of this world.

I’m filing this one under Doesn’t Convince.

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