Students with a Turkish background are discriminated against in dictation. A new study by Mannheim educational researchers shows that..: Whoever is called Murat gets worse marks - even with the same number of mistakes.Same performance, unequal grades: When prospective teachers rate primary school children, pupils with Turkish first names receive worse marks. This was the result of a study by researchers at the Chair of Educational Psychology at the University of Mannheim.The scientists had given the dictation text of an eight-year-old to teacher training students for their study. The text was always the same and contained the same mistakes - sometimes, however, the supposed author's name was Max, sometimes Murat. Depending on whether the child's first name suggested a German or Turkish background, the rating tended to be better or worse."Obviously, the problem is not in determining the errors, but in the grading," says Meike Bonefeld, one of the authors of the study. In fact, she would have expected the students named Max to chalk up fewer mistakes than the Murat group. However, the built-in errors were painted equally often - the only difference was in the subsequent evaluation. "That took us by surprise."In order to check whether the discriminatory assessment of students of Turkish origin depends on their performance level, the psychologists formed two sub-groups: In one of them there were only five mistakes in the dictation, which was considered a good performance. In the text of the other groups there were 30 mistakes, which was considered a bad performance. The researchers observed the clear difference in the evaluation in both constellations."Our study provides new starting points for teacher training," says Meike Bonefeld. It calls for the evaluation standards for student performance to be harmonised, "so that future teachers will be able to award grades according to more objective standards in future". Teachers would have to be given clear rules so that the subjective part of the evaluation would be significantly reduced.Last year, Mannheim psychologists had already examined 1500 high school students to see how strongly the migration background of students affects their maths grades. The result at the time: With the same language skills and social background, migrant children were clearly discriminated against compared to their classmates without this background.Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator