A number of high schools across the United States have moved to later bell times on the belief that their previous bell times were too early for the “biological clocks” of adolescents. In this article I study whether doing so improves academic performance. I first focus on the Twin Cities...

We examine the effect of participation in 4-H, the largest youth development program in the United States, on standardized test scores. We do this by utilizing grade-level longitudinal data on Florida's school districts from the Florida Department of Education combined with 4-H participation...

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the effect of early school entry on educational outcomes using standardized test score data on Italian pupils. The empirical procedure is designed to disentangle the effect of regular entry (Gift of Time) from possible unobserved confounding...

Although there are exceptions, most European universities and institutions of higher education find it difficult to compete with the best universities in the Anglo-Saxon world. Despite the Bologna agreement and the ambitions of the Lisbon agenda, European universities are in need of fundamental...

Real grade inflation is the upward shift in grades without a similar rise in achievement (Kohn [2002]; Rosovsky and Hartley [2002]). It implies a decline in standards and obscures the role of grades as a signal of academic ability. Guskey [2003] believes that resolving the debate on grade...

This paper documents a startling difference in the grading standards between education departments and other academic departments at universities – undergraduate students in education classes receive significantly higher grades than students in all other classes. This phenomenon cannot be...

At the private university we analyze, the gap between white and black grade point averages falls by half between the students' freshmen and senior year. This outcome could suggest that affirmative action policies are playing a key role to reduce racial differences. However, this convergence...

In this study, we adopt the Probit model and employ data on nine new freshmen cohorts at a public regional university to examine predictive factors for students' retention and measure projected probability of retention for an average college student. Results suggest four main findings: 1) high...

Previous work on the relation between school inputs and students' educational attainment typically fails to account for the fact that schools can adjust their grading structure, even though such actions are likely to affect students' incentives. Our theoretical model shows that, depending on...