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Author
E. Czibor
S. Onderstal
R. Sloof
M. van Praag
Year
2014
Title
Does relative grading help male students? Evidence from a field experiment in the classroom
Number of pages
35
Publisher
Bonn: Forschungsinstituut zur Zukunft der Arbeit
Serie
IZA discussion paper
Volume | Edition (Serie)
8429
Document type
Working paper
Faculty
Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB)
Institute
Amsterdam Business School Research Institute (ABS-RI)
Amsterdam School of Economics Research Institute (ASE-RI)
Abstract
The provision of non-pecuniary incentives in education is a topic that has received much scholarly attention lately. Our paper contributes to this discussion by investigating the effectiveness of grade incentives in increasing student performance. We perform a direct comparison of the two most commonly used grading practices: the absolute (i.e., criterion-referenced) and the relative (i.e., norm-referenced) grading schemes in a large-scale field experiment at a university. We hypothesize that relative grading, by creating a rank-order tournament in the classroom, provides stronger incentives for male students than absolute grading. In the full sample, we find weak support for our hypothesis. Among the more motivated students we find evidence that men indeed score significantly higher on the test when graded on a curve. Female students, irrespective of their motivation, do not increase their scores under relative grading. Since women slightly outperform men under absolute grading, grading on a curve actually narrows the gender gap in performance.
Link
Link
Language
English
Note
dp8429: 168347_dp8429.pdf: August 2014
August 2014
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/11245/1.504857

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