In this paper, we show that the design and decentralized, school-based scoring of New York's high school exit exams - the Regents Examinations - led to the systematic manipulation of test sores just below important proficiency cutoffs. Our estimates suggest that teachers inflate approximately 40...

Value-added (VA) models measure the productivity of agents such as teachers or doctors based on the outcomes they produce. The utility of VA models for performance evaluation depends on the extent to which VA estimates are biased by selection, for instance by differences in the abilities of...