Do Teachers Give Bad Grades To Students They Don’t Like?

Most teachers treat students fairly, and most schools have policies designed to make grading defensible rather than personal. But students do sometimes receive a grade that feels targeted, and dismissing that outright is not honest either. This page separates the explanations that are common from the one that is rare, and sets out what to actually do about a grade you think is wrong.

Updated August 2026

Do teachers give bad grades to students they don’t like?

Occasionally, yes. Teachers are people in a position of authority, and a small number abuse it — most often as retaliation after a complaint, rather than as general dislike. But it is uncommon, it is professional misconduct where it happens, and it is a much less frequent cause of a disappointing grade than the alternatives below.

The reason this matters practically: if you assume malice, the only thing you can do is feel aggrieved. If you check the rubric first, you often find something you can actually challenge.

Grading varies more between teachers than most people realise

This is the single most useful thing to know, and almost nobody is told it. Marking the same work does not reliably produce the same grade.

The classic demonstration is over a century old and has been replicated many times since. As summarised by Thomas Guskey in Educational Leadership, when Daniel Starch and Edward Elliott asked more than 140 high school English teachers to grade the same two papers in 1912, scores on one ranged from 64 to 98 and on the other from 50 to 97. One paper was failed by 15% of the teachers and given over 90 by 12% of them. When they repeated the exercise with 128 mathematics teachers and a geometry paper the following year, the spread was wider still — 28 to 95.

Rubrics, moderation and second-marking exist precisely because of this. They narrow the spread; they do not eliminate it. So two students can hand in comparable work and receive different grades, and two teachers can mark the same work differently, without anyone disliking anyone.

Reasons a grade looks personal but usually isn’t

You were graded against a rubric, not an impression

Most substantial assessments are scored criterion by criterion. Work that felt strong overall can lose marks on a criterion you did not weight heavily — structure, evidence, referencing, addressing the actual question asked. Asking which criterion cost you the marks usually explains the grade in a sentence.

The work was flagged for plagiarism

Plagiarism is not limited to copy-and-paste. Yale’s Poorvu Center defines plagiarism as “the use of another’s work, words, or ideas without attribution,” and includes paraphrasing that stays “too close to the original.” Bowdoin College names this mosaic plagiarism: “when a student borrows phrases from a source without using quotation marks, or finds synonyms for the author’s language while keeping to the same general structure and meaning of the original.”

This catches more students than they expect. Work rewritten from a classmate’s submission, a tutoring site answer, or a paraphrasing tool can be identified by similarity software or simply recognised by a teacher who has read the source. Consequences range from a reduced grade to a formal academic-integrity case, and a grade reduction that arrives without an explanation can easily read as personal when it is not.

A teaching assistant marked it

In large courses, assignments are often marked by teaching assistants working from the instructor’s rubric. Variation between markers within one class is common, and it is a legitimate basis for asking that a piece be looked at again.

The submission was hard to read

Illegible handwriting, missing structure, no paragraphing, or an unclear line of argument all cost marks, because a marker can only credit what they can follow. This is not pettiness — it is usually written into the rubric as clarity or presentation.

Marking fatigue

Grading arrives in concentrated waves, and consistency drifts across a long stack of scripts. This is a recognised risk rather than a secret, which is why moderation and anonymised marking exist. If your mark departs clearly from the published criteria, that is a fair thing to raise.

When it genuinely is personal

Sometimes the answer is yes. The patterns worth taking seriously are narrower than “my teacher doesn’t like me”:

• Retaliation. A grade drops noticeably after you complained about the teacher, or after a dispute. A change in marking that coincides with a complaint is the clearest warning sign there is.
• A consistent pattern, not one grade. One disappointing mark is weak evidence. The same work scoring differently from a classmate’s across several assignments is stronger.
• Discrimination. Grading affected by race, national origin, sex, disability or age is not merely unfair — it is unlawful in US schools that receive federal funding, and it is handled differently from an ordinary grade dispute (see below).

Favouritism in the classroom is a broader subject of its own, and having favourites is not the same thing as marking unfairly — we cover that separately in do teachers have favorites?

How to tell whether your teacher actually read your work

A common suspicion is that the teacher never read the submission and graded on name recognition alone. There are honest ways to test that, and one popular method that you should not use.

The checks that work

• Ask for the rubric breakdown — the score against each criterion, not just the total. A marker who did not read the work usually cannot produce one.
• Ask a specific question about a specific passage: “Could you tell me what was weak about the third section?” Vague answers to specific questions are informative.
• Ask for written feedback if none was given. Most institutions require feedback to be available on request.
• Request a re-grade or a second marker. Where a formal route exists, this is the mechanism designed for exactly this doubt.

The trick that circulates online — and why it backfires

The widely shared version of this test is to hide something absurd in the middle of a paper — a random word, a nonsense sentence, a joke aimed at the teacher — and see whether anyone comments. It is a bad idea for three reasons.

First, it is your own graded work: if the marker does read it, you have damaged a submission that counts toward your grade, and irrelevant content is exactly the kind of thing a rubric penalises. Second, it proves very little either way — feedback is often selective, and silence on one sentence is not evidence that nothing was read. Third, and most seriously, the usual advice attached to this trick is to deny it if you are caught. Lying to a teacher about your own submitted work turns a grade question into an academic-integrity question, and those are judged far more harshly than a disputed mark.

If you suspect work is not being read properly, the rubric request above puts the same question to the teacher directly, creates a record, and carries no risk to you.

What to do if you think a grade was unfair

Work through this in order. Each step is more formal than the last, and skipping to the end weakens your case.

• 1. Re-read the rubric and the brief. Check the grade against the criteria before raising it. This resolves a large share of disputes on its own.
• 2. Ask the teacher, in writing, about one specific thing. Name the assignment and the criterion. Keep it civil and brief. Email creates a record and gives them time to check properly.
• 3. Request a re-grade or second marker. Many institutions have a defined process for this, often with a short deadline after grades are released.
• 4. Use the formal grade appeal. Escalation usually runs teacher, then department head or year head, then dean or principal. Find the written appeal policy — the grounds and the deadline are both defined in it, and appeals are usually limited to procedural error or bias rather than disagreement with academic judgement.
• 5. If discrimination is involved, that is a separate route. In the US, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights enforces Title VI (race, colour, national origin), Title IX (sex), Section 504 and the ADA (disability), and the Age Discrimination Act. A complaint must generally be filed within 180 calendar days of the alleged discrimination, though a waiver can be requested if you explain why the filing is late. OCR then decides whether to investigate, notifies both sides, and attempts to negotiate a resolution where it finds a violation; a dismissal or finding can itself be appealed within 60 days.
• Document as you go. Keep the assignment, the rubric, the feedback and the emails. Appeals are decided on records, not recollections.

This is general information about how these processes usually work, not legal advice, and the specifics vary by country, district and institution. Your own school’s written policy is the authority.

Common questions

Can a teacher legally give a student a bad grade because they don’t like them?

Academic judgement is generally left to the institution, so an ordinary unfair grade is handled through the school’s appeal process rather than the courts. It changes character when the reason is a protected characteristic — that is discrimination, and it has its own complaint route.

How do I prove a teacher graded me unfairly?

With the rubric and a pattern, not with a single grade or a trap. Compare the mark against the stated criteria, gather more than one instance, and keep written records of feedback and correspondence.

Do teachers grade harder on students who complain about them?

Most do not, and retaliation is misconduct. If marks change noticeably after a complaint, that timing is exactly what an appeal or a grievance is for, and it is worth documenting from the outset.

Can I ask for a different teacher to mark my work?

Often yes, through a re-grade or second-marker request, though it usually has to go through the department rather than the teacher directly, and there is normally a deadline.

Should I confront a teacher I think is grading me unfairly?

Raise it, but do not frame it as an accusation. An email asking about a specific criterion gets the same information as a confrontation, without putting the teacher on the defensive — and if the matter does escalate later, a calm written record helps your case considerably. Accusations of bias made in person and without evidence tend to end the conversation rather than resolve it.

Does one bad grade really matter?

Usually less than it feels at the time. A single assignment is normally a small fraction of a course grade, and a single course a small fraction of a GPA. The exception is a course with a minimum grade requirement attached, such as a prerequisite or a licensure-linked programme, where a threshold matters more than the average.