Daniel Kahneman, a famous psychologist and Nobel Prize winner, writes that : “The first question I scored had a disproportionate effect on the overall grade. The mechanism was simple: if I had given a high score to the first essay, I gave the student the benefit of the doubt whenever I encountered a vague or ambiguous statement later on... If a student had written two essays one strong and one weak, I would end up with different final grades depending on which essay I read first” .
Halo effect can be defined as cognitive bias in which observer's overall impression towards a person, product or brand influences the thoughts about that particular object's properties or features. Due to one particular trait, whether positive or negative, it tends to overwhelms the assessment of other traits. It creates a bias that affects the overall judgment of the individual regarding that entity. It works in…show more content… To test the above hypothesis that grading previous questions affects the grading of the next question we conducted an experiment. As a data-set we took the marks obtained by 107 students in a particular exam. The question paper contained 20 multiple choice questions (MCQs) and three long answers question. Most of the students attempted MCQs first and then the long answers. To measure the halo effect we tried to find extent to which marks obtained in MCQs affected the marks obtained in long answers. The obtained correlation was positive with magnitude 0.7265. The one tail and two tailed p-value was also close to zero. The positive direction and magnitude shows that student obtaining high marks in MCQs tend to score high marks in long answers which supports our hypothesis and lower p-value further strengthens the
