Does Near-Peer Mentoring Improve Honours Research Grades? Evidence from a Randomised Pilot in Economics

This paper examines whether structured near-peer mentoring improves the research performance of Honours students in economics. Using a randomised stage-rotation design at the University of Pretoria, 50 Honours students were assigned to a PhD-student mentor during either the research proposal stage (Semester 1) or the research paper stage (Semester 2), ensuring that every student was mentored while a comparison group was preserved at each stage. We estimate intention-to-treat (ITT) effects of assignment and, using random assignment as an instrument for self-reported contact, local average treatment effects (LATE) of actual engagement. Compliance was high, at 87 percent in Semester 1 and 100 percent in Semester 2. All point estimates are positive but statistically insignificant: assignment is associated with increases of 0.52 points (out of 10) in the proposal grade and 1.86 points (out of 100) in the research paper grade, with corresponding LATE estimates of 0.99 and 4.29 points. Among mentored students, more frequent meetings are associated with significantly higher proposal grades (1.26 points per additional frequency level, p = 0.024), but not with research paper grades. The findings suggest that engagement intensity, rather than assignment per se, is the more likely channel of any mentoring effect, and that generic research guidance is most valuable while the research question is still being formulated. The design offers a low-cost and ethically defensible framework for evaluating postgraduate research support.