Students with the Initial ‘A’ Don’t Get Better Grades

Abstract

It has been claimed that students whose first or last name begins with the letters A or B have higher grade point averages than students whose first or last name begins with the letters C or D. This “result” was achieved by a naive and incoherent application of statistical methods. We correctly analyze the problem using a new dataset and conclude that the claim is completely unsupported.

Keywords: name letter effect, spurious correlation