IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ctc/serie1/def051.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Monitoring and sanctioning cheating at school: What works? Evidence from a national evaluation program

Author

Listed:
  • Claudio Lucifora

    () (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
    Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore)

  • Marco Tonello

Abstract

The diffusion of evaluation programs, along with the higher stake they account for, has also increased the prevalence of opportunistic behavior and cheating practices. This paper investigates the efficacy of different policy measures aimed at fighting cheating behaviors in schools. We exploit a classroom-based randomized experiment in Italian public schools, which assigned an external inspector to monitor the administration and marking of the tests, as well as different sanctioning mechanisms for schools suspect of cheating. We find that higher monitoring is effective in deterring cheating at all grades, while sanctions in general have no effect, and, under specific circumstances, may also trigger schools’ strategic behaviors, such as selective pooling. The ineffectiveness of sanctioning schemes is explained by the fact that they are not embedded in a proper school accountability system.

Suggested Citation

  • Claudio Lucifora & Marco Tonello, 2016. "Monitoring and sanctioning cheating at school: What works? Evidence from a national evaluation program," DISCE - Working Papers del Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza def051, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimenti e Istituti di Scienze Economiche (DISCE).
    • Handle: RePEc:ctc:serie1:def051
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dipartimenti.unicatt.it/economia-finanza-def051.pdf
    File Function: First version, 2016
    Download Restriction: no

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. David Card & Laura Giuliano, 2013. "Peer Effects and Multiple Equilibria in the Risky Behavior of Friends," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 95(4), pages 1130-1149, October.
    2. Rebecca Diamond & Petra Persson, 2016. "The Long-term Consequences of Teacher Discretion in Grading of High-stakes Tests," NBER Working Papers 22207, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Giorgio Brunello & Daniele Checchi, 2007. "Does school tracking affect equality of opportunity? New international evidence," Economic Policy, CEPR;CES;MSH, vol. 22, pages 781-861, October.
    4. Battistin, Erich & De Nadai, Michele & Vuri, Daniela, 2017. "Counting rotten apples: Student achievement and score manipulation in Italian elementary Schools," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 200(2), pages 344-362.
    5. Estrada, Ricardo, 2015. "Rules Rather than Discretion: Teacher Hiring and Rent Extraction," Economics Working Papers MWP2015/14, European University Institute.
    6. Thomas S. Dee & Brian A. Jacob, 2012. "Rational Ignorance in Education: A Field Experiment in Student Plagiarism," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 47(2), pages 397-434.
    7. Sarah R. Cohodes, 2016. "Teaching to the Student: Charter School Effectiveness in Spite of Perverse Incentives," Education Finance and Policy, MIT Press, vol. 11(1), pages 1-42, Winter.
    8. Thomas Ahn & Jacob Vigdor, 2014. "The Impact of No Child Left Behind's Accountability Sanctions on School Performance: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from North Carolina," NBER Working Papers 20511, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    9. Jere R. Behrman & Susan W. Parker & Petra E. Todd & Kenneth I. Wolpin, 2015. "Aligning Learning Incentives of Students and Teachers: Results from a Social Experiment in Mexican High Schools," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 123(2), pages 325-364.
    10. Thomas S. Dee & Will Dobbie & Brian A. Jacob & Jonah Rockoff, 2016. "The Causes and Consequences of Test Score Manipulation: Evidence from the New York Regents Examinations," NBER Working Papers 22165, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    11. Bertoni, Marco & Brunello, Giorgio & Rocco, Lorenzo, 2013. "When the cat is near, the mice won't play: The effect of external examiners in Italian schools," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 104(C), pages 65-77.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Rosario Crinò & Giovanni Immordino & Salvatore Piccolo, 2018. "Fighting Mobile Crime," DISCE - Working Papers del Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza def071, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimenti e Istituti di Scienze Economiche (DISCE).
      • Rosario Crino & Giovanni Immordino & Gülen Karakoç-Palminteri & Salvatore Piccolo, 2018. "Fighting Mobile Crime," CSEF Working Papers 504, Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy.
    2. Michele Tettamanzi, 2017. "E Many Pluribus Unum: A Behavioural Macro-Economic Agent Based Model," DISCE - Working Papers del Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza def062, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimenti e Istituti di Scienze Economiche (DISCE).
    3. Elena Cottini & Paolo Ghinetti, 2017. "Is it the way you live or the job you have? Health effects of lifestyles and working conditions," DISCE - Working Papers del Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza def056, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimenti e Istituti di Scienze Economiche (DISCE).
    4. Russell Davidson & Andrea Monticini, 2018. "Improvements in Bootstrap Inference," DISCE - Working Papers del Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza def070, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimenti e Istituti di Scienze Economiche (DISCE).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    cheating; monitoring; incentives.;

    JEL classification:

    • I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education
    • I28 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Government Policy
    • K42 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior - - - Illegal Behavior and the Enforcement of Law

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:ctc:serie1:def051. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Simone Moriconi). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/dscatit.html .

    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.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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.

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.