IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bol/bodewp/wp1223.html

Do High-Stakes Exams Widen Gender Gaps in Early Adolescence? Evidence from a Middle-School Exit Exam Reform

Author

Listed:
  • Annalisa Loviglio
  • Veronica Rattini
  • Federico Stronati

Abstract

Do high-stakes exams widen gender gaps in academic performance? We study this question in early adolescence using Italy's lower-secondary exit exam. A 2017 reform removed the national standardized test from the final grade while preserving the requirement to take the same test, reducing stakes without changing content. Using administrative data on the full population of students and a difference-in-differences design, we compare gender gaps before and after the reform. We find no evidence that higher stakes disadvantage girls. If anything, girls perform slightly better relative to boys when the test has exam stakes, suggesting gender differences under pressure emerge later in education.

Suggested Citation

  • Annalisa Loviglio & Veronica Rattini & Federico Stronati, 2026. "Do High-Stakes Exams Widen Gender Gaps in Early Adolescence? Evidence from a Middle-School Exit Exam Reform," Working Papers wp1223, Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna.
    • Handle: RePEc:bol:bodewp:wp1223
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://amsacta.unibo.it/8960/1/WP1223.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education
    • I24 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Education and Inequality
    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bol:bodewp:wp1223. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sebolit.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.