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Cognitive Biases in Visualizations pp 161–175Cite as

A Visualization Approach to Addressing Reviewer Bias in Holistic College Admissions

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Abstract

Expert intuition plays a significant role in decision making in professional domains such as medical diagnostics and holistic reviews in admissions. Every case or application encountered is viewed as unique and human assessments are considered indispensable in their discernment. However, these domains can be representative of environments referred to as low-validity environments, which are those that do not offer adequate opportunity to observe regularities and develop the right intuitions. As a consequence, the experts can be susceptible to cognitive biases. One example of a low-validity environment is the holistic review process in college admissions where every student application is individually reviewed and subjectively evaluated in its entirety by at least one reviewer. We conducted interviews and observations to study the holistic review process at a university in the United States with the goal of designing information visualization tools to support the process. We list examples of potential reviewer biases identified and present theoretical ideas on how the biases can be mitigated through visualization tools. These ideas include employing strategies that conflict with the conventional principles of interface and visualization design. This chapter is intended as a discussion of the likely occurrence of biases in a domain where subjective evaluations are the norm and how these biases can be countered using visualizations by understanding the bias manifestations.

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Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the admissions officers at the university where we conducted our studies for their cooperation and participation in our research study. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1816620.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA

    Poorna Talkad Sukumar & Ronald Metoyer

Authors
  1. Poorna Talkad Sukumar
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  2. Ronald Metoyer
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Correspondence to Poorna Talkad Sukumar .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Data Analysis and Visualisation Group, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany

    Geoffrey Ellis

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Sukumar, P.T., Metoyer, R. (2018). A Visualization Approach to Addressing Reviewer Bias in Holistic College Admissions. In: Ellis, G. (eds) Cognitive Biases in Visualizations. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95831-6_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95831-6_12

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-95830-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-95831-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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