The Performance of New and Repeating Students in Introductory Economics

We examine the performance of students repeating introductory microeconomics and macroeconomics courses, relative to that of students taking the courses for the first time. The study covers 937 grades received by 439 undergraduate business students. We find that the grades of students who previously failed or withdrew from the course are lower and more variable than the grades of students taking it for the first time. By contrast, the grades of students who previously passed the course are higher than the grades of the new students. These differences remain statistically significant after controlling for high school averages