Explaining gender gap variation across assessment forms

Georg Graetz and Arizo Karimi

No 2019:8, Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy

Abstract: In Sweden, females outperform males on compulsory and high school GPAs by a third of a standard deviation, while males outperform females on the Swedish SAT by the same magnitude. We establish that GPAs capture different attributes and skills compared to SAT scores. Differences in motivation and effort explain up to 60 percent of the female advantage in GPAs, while cognitive skills explain 40 percent of the male advantage in SAT scores. The latter is accounted for by differential self-selection into taking the SAT. Our findings imply large effects of the choice of university admission criterion on admitted students’characteristics.

Keywords: gender gaps; student assessment; cognitive skills; non-cognitive skills; university admissions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I24 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2019-05-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-gen and nep-neu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifau.se/globalassets/pdf/se/2019/wp-20 ... assessment-forms.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:ifauwp:2019_008

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy IFAU, P O Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ali Ghooloo ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).