Social Promotion and Learning Outcomes : Evidence from India

We study the effects of a national social promotion policy on learning outcomes in India. The “No Detention Policy” mandated automatic promotion of students till grade 8. Exploiting variation in pre-existing grade retention rules across states, we set up a differences-in-differences design. Using data from eight years of a large-scale education survey, we find that social promotion improved reading scores by 2.5 percent, and math scores by 5 percent. Both boys and girls show improvements in learning outcomes and the effects are strongest in the lowest quartile of the test score distribution. We consider different mechanisms that could be driving our results