IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nip/nipewp/4-2022.html

High school and exam scores: Does their predictive validity for academic performance vary with programme selectivity?

Author

Listed:
  • Pedro Luis Silva

    (Centre for Research in Higher Education Policies, School of Economics and Management (FEP); and IZA Institute of Labor Economics)

  • Carla Sá

    (NIPE/Center for Research in Economics and Management, University of Minho; and Centre for Research in Higher Education Policies (CIPES))

  • Ricardo Biscaia

    (Centre for Research in Higher Education Policies (CIPES), Portugal; and School of Economics and Management (FEP), University of Porto, Portugal)

  • Pedro N. Teixeira

    (Centre for Research in Higher Education Policies (CIPES), Portugal and School of Economics and Management (FEP), University of Porto, Portugal and IZA Institute of Labor Economics, Germany)

Abstract

Students are admitted into higher education based on their past performance.This paper compares two measures of past cognitive skills: teacher and national exam scores. By using a nationwide dataset, we look at how the predictive power of teacher assessment and exam scores for selecting successful students may vary with the degree of selectivity of higher education programmes. We find that teacher scores predict students’ performance in higher education more accurately, and its predictive power remains the same independently of the selectivity programme indicator considered. We found that national exam scores are noisier and only gain relevance for highly selective programmes. Furthermore, we explore national exams’ volatility and institutional selectivity as potential mechanisms to justify the results. Our results provide solid policy hints on the role that high school scores and admission exams should have for access and performance in higher education.

Suggested Citation

  • Pedro Luis Silva & Carla Sá & Ricardo Biscaia & Pedro N. Teixeira, 2022. "High school and exam scores: Does their predictive validity for academic performance vary with programme selectivity?," NIPE Working Papers 4/2022, NIPE - Universidade do Minho.
    • Handle: RePEc:nip:nipewp:4/2022
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://repositorium.sdum.uminho.pt/handle/1822/78672
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Stephan Maurer & Guido Schwerdt & Simon Wiederhold, 2023. "Do Role Models Matter in Large Classes? New Evidence on Gender Match Effects in Higher Education," CESifo Working Paper Series 10208, CESifo.
    2. Maurer, Stephan & Schwerdt, Guido & Wiederhold, Simon, 2024. "Understanding Gender Match Effects in Higher Education: The Role of Class Size," VfS Annual Conference 2024 (Berlin): Upcoming Labor Market Challenges 302339, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • I23 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Higher Education; Research Institutions
    • I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education
    • I20 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - General
    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity

    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:nip:nipewp:4/2022. 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: NIPE (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nipampt.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.