Exhausting exams: the wellbeing effects of compulsory retakes

Policies that require low-attaining students to continue investing in foundational skills may generate future human-capital benefits but also impose short-run psychological costs. We study this trade-off using England's compulsory GCSE English and mathematics resit requirement. Using longitudinal survey data from the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), we estimate the effect of exposure to England's compulsory resit requirement on adolescent wellbeing, controlling for cognitive ability, prior wellbeing and a rich set of demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. We conduct a cross-country falsification test using Wales and Northern Ireland, where students also take GCSEs but face no comparable national resit requirement. We find that exposure to the requirement lowers wellbeing at age 17 by approximately 0.11 SDs. These effects are about exposure to retakes at the extensive margin - we find no evidence of an additional penalty for retaking in multiple subjects. Our average estimates conceal substantial heterogeneity: English resitting is associated with lower wellbeing among boys, while mathematics resitting is associated with lower wellbeing among girls. For boys resitting English, the negative estimates are concentrated among students further below the pass threshold, consistent with a discouragement mechanism; for girls resitting mathematics, they are concentrated among those who narrowly miss the threshold, consistent with a near-miss penalty. The results identify a potentially important non-pecuniary cost of compulsory remedial education and highlight a trade-off between policies designed to raise foundational skills and adolescent wellbeing.