The rapid increase in online instruction in higher education has heightened concerns about cheating. We use a randomized control design to test whether informing students that we can detect plagiarism reduces cheating. We further test whether informing students they have been caught cheating...

We develop a simple algorithm for detecting exam cheating between students who copy off one another's exam. When this algorithm is applied to exams in a general science course at a top university, we find strong evidence of cheating by at least 10 percent of the students. Students studying...

We collect a comprehensive set of non-academic characteristics for a representative sample of incoming freshman to explore which measures best predict the wide variance in first-year college performance unaccounted for by past grades. We focus our attention on student outliers. Students whose...

We study a unique grading policy at a large US public university allowing students to mask their letter grades into a "Pass", after having observed their original grade. Using administrative transcript records, we find that female students are substantially less likely to mask their grades than...

This paper describes the effects of two variants of a virtual college-counseling intervention designed to reduce informational and social support barriers to college application and enrollment among socioeconomically disadvantaged students. Students who were randomly assigned to the program felt...

We study the effects of available student loan repayment plans on borrowers' career choices. By removing the risk of loan default, income driven repayment (IDR) plans make higher-paying but riskier jobs more attractive to those with moderate skill levels. We present experimental evidence that...

We leverage a large-scale incentivized survey eliciting behaviors from (almost) an entire university student population, a representative sample of the U.S. population, and Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to address concerns about the external validity of experiments with student participants....