Traditional Roles For Various Ink Colors?

[Newjelan]

In Berlin:

green - members of senate and the districts (I assume it's likewise for members of cabinet of the other german states, but being a city-state we have (a) mayor(s) instead of a premier)

red - state secretaries

brown - board of audit

In the Australian public service, green ink used to be for the exclusive use of the Auditor-General's office and purple ink for the exclusive use of Internal Auditors.

[joehill]

 

Just found this study referenced in one of my links:

Rutchick, Slepian and Ferris (2010) 'The pen is mightier than the word: Object priming of evaluative standards.' European Journal of Social Psychology, 40, 704-708.

 

From the article I linked (Dukes and Albanesi, 2013):

"Recent evidence suggests that the effect of grading in red is not limited to student reactions, but it begins with the teacher grading in red. In a series of studies by Rutchick, Slepian and Ferris (2010), college students acting as teachers and using red grading pens mark more errors on a fictitious essay by an eighth grade student, and they assign lower grades than participants who use a blue pen. The authors conclude that while educators rightly are concerned with the affect of red ink on students, a greater concern is the effect upon the teachers of writing in red."

 

I'm proctoring an exam (not sure what color I'll use to grade it ;-) ) and had a chance to skim the Dukes and Albanesi paper. It's concerned with how the color of the comments (printed in a handwriting font, but ..) affect undergraduates' assessments of instructor teaching quality, etc. So it's about whether using a different color for grading can improve the instructor's scores on student evaluations of teaching. (They did ask the undergraduate subjects, who presumably have little or no experience grading, what grade they would give the essay, but that's hardly a realistic investigation of the effect on harshness of grading. And the effect is very small: "For comments written with the red grading pen, participants judge the grade as 3.4% lower than the grade they assign to the essay, and for comments written in aqua participants judge the grade as 2.9% too low.") Since the subjects in this experiment are only reading an (alleged) student essay with instructor comments (in red or aqua) and seeing the grade, but have no actual classroom experience with the instructor, even the generalization to real teaching evaluations seems pretty weak.

 

My exam is ending, but I'll try to read the Rutchick, Slepian, and Ferris paper soon, maybe even before I grade the exams.

[MartinSimonnet]

Currently in lawschool, and we are forbidden from handing in papers written with any color other than blue or black. Blue-black is ok too. However, no underlining with any other color, if we wish to underline, we have to do it in the same ink we have written the paper with.

Additionally, any writing on the page has to be made using the same ink color.

[Mr. Pink]

Perhaps not traditional -

 

I just refinanced my house. Papers needed to be signed in front of a notary.

 

He required blue ink for all signatures - black not allowed. I had a nice pen all ready, filled with a dark blue/black ink. Easily distinguished by me as different from black, but caused him problems.

 

.

Same here, but just so happened that I had my MB full of blue.

[Opooh]

Back in the olden days of the medical profession, patient's progress notes were in paper, with entries in ink. Red by nurses, green by pharmacists, and blue/black by physicians.

In Belgium a patient had a medical and a nursing file, no pharmacist or physicians file. In the medical file red was used to highlight aberrant values.

[joehill]

 

Just found this study referenced in one of my links:

Rutchick, Slepian and Ferris (2010) 'The pen is mightier than the word: Object priming of evaluative standards.' European Journal of Social Psychology, 40, 704-708.

 

From the article I linked (Dukes and Albanesi, 2013):

"Recent evidence suggests that the effect of grading in red is not limited to student reactions, but it begins with the teacher grading in red. In a series of studies by Rutchick, Slepian and Ferris (2010), college students acting as teachers and using red grading pens mark more errors on a fictitious essay by an eighth grade student, and they assign lower grades than participants who use a blue pen. The authors conclude that while educators rightly are concerned with the affect of red ink on students, a greater concern is the effect upon the teachers of writing in red."

 

So it turns out that the college students in the Rutchick et al. study weren't actually acting as teachers, they were just recruited to be subjects in an experiment. There were three studies. The first of the two that have to do with grading involves correcting a (fictitious) essay written by a student learning English. Subjects were asked to mark all the errors. Subjects using red pens marked more errors than subjects using blue pens and the result was statistically significant (though not by a lot: p=.04). But the paper doesn't say how many errors there really were and whether the people with red pens simply were more accurate than the people with blue pens. In fact, the authors say "However, it is not clear from this study alone that red pens promote evaluative harshness; the marking of errors could simply reflect increased vigilance and attention to detail (see Mehta & Zhu, 2009). To refine our findings, we next examined a more clearly subjective evaluative task: Assigning a grade to an essay that lacked objective errors." (I don't know why they don't attempt to evaluate the accuracy of the grading; that seems like the interesting question.)

 

In that study, college students (recruited from introductory psychology courses, who probably are required to participate in a certain number of experiments to get credit) were asked to grade an essay, supposedly written by an eighth grader. There were no grammatical or spelling errors, but some "suboptimal word choices". Subjects using red pens assigned somewhat lower grades (a bit less than 4 points lower, on average, out of 100), again with pretty marginal statistical significance. But these subjects were not experienced graders. There doesn't seem to be anything in the paper to suggest that real teachers doing grading as part of their usual work would be any harsher using red ink than blue ink.

 

There have been several past threads about grading in red versus other colors, and some have cited research showing that grading in red made people grade more harshly. I haven't searched those threads to see if the Rutchick paper is the source of those references, but if it is, I'd have to say the evidence for the assertion isn't very strong. (But maybe there are other papers more relevant to real grading and showing stronger effects?)

[GTOZack]

@Randwulfr

You are correct on both counts.

 

In high school, on the yearbook and newspaper. The pages were put together on large layout sheets which were printed like a graph paper, in a blueish color to help with alignment. The editors would make marks on the layout in blue pencil. When the layout was shot at the printers, I think the film used was insensitive to blue, which would effectively make the blue lines and writing invisible.

 

When I worked in a CPA firm, they used blue pencil for certain things, because it would not show up in a photo copy, but would be in the working papers. Don't ask me what, it was several decades ago.

 

I used the red/blue colored pencils when I was a kid, but never asked my mother WHY they had this combo.

So many things I should have asked her about...

 

 

thats what i used in silkscreening, it was some kind of emulsion ink it renders invis udner certain rays.