test scores

Economists often use test scores to measure a student’s performance or an adult’s human capital. These scores reflect non-trivial decisions about how to measure and scale student achievement, with important implications for secondary analyses. For ex...

In this paper, we show that the design and decentralized, school-based scoring of New York’s high school exit exams – the Regents Examinations – led to the systematic manipulation of test scores just below important proficiency cutoffs. Our estimates...

This paper examines the effect of early childhood investments on college enrollment and degree completion. We use the random assignment in the Project STAR experiment to estimate the effect of smaller classes in primary school on college entry, colle...

In 2006 the state of Michigan adopted a comprehensive set of high school graduation requirements known as the Michigan Merit Curriculum (MMC). These requirements were designed to increase the rigor of high school course taking in Michigan and better ...

The challenge of designing effective performance measurement and incentives is a general one in economic settings where behavior and outcomes are not easily observable. These issues are particularly prominent in education where, over the last two dec...

The challenge of designing effective performance measurement and incentives is a general one in economic settings where behavior and outcomes are not easily observable. These issues are particularly prominent in education where, over the last two dec...

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act compelled states to design school-accountability systems based on annual student assessments. The effect of this Federal legislation on the distribution of student achievement is a highly controversial but centrall...

Research on the relationship between teachers' characteristics and teacher effectiveness has been underway for over a century, yet little progress has been made in linking teacher quality with factors observable at the time of hire. However, most res...

Educational interventions are often narrowly targeted and temporary, and evaluations often focus on the short-run impacts of the intervention. Insofar as the positive effects of educational interventions fadeout over time, however, such assessments m...

The pressures of accountability may encourage school personnel to doctor the results from high-stakes tests. Here’s how to stop them.

We develop an algorithm for detecting teacher cheating that combines information on unexpected test score fluctuations and suspicious patterns of answers for students in a classroom. Using data from the Chicago Public Schools, we estimate that seriou...

The recent federal education bill, No Child Left Behind, requires states to test students in grades three to eight each year, and to judge school performance on the basis of these test scores. While intended to maximize student learning, there is lit...