To Leave or Not to Leave? A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of the Impact of Failing the High School Exit Exam

Dongshu Ou ()

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: The high school exit exam (HSEE) is rapidly becoming a standardized assessment procedure foreducational accountability in the United States. I use a unique state-specific dataset to identify theeffect of failing the HSEE on the likelihood that a student drops out early based on a RegressionDiscontinuity design. It shows that students who barely fail the exam are more likely to exit thanthose who barely pass despite being offered retest opportunities. The discontinuity amounts to a largeproportion of the dropout probability of barely-failers, particularly for minority and low-incomestudents, suggesting that the potential benefit of raising educational standards might come at the costof increasing inequalities in the educational system.

Keywords: high school exit exam; student dropout; regression discontinuity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I28 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-lab and nep-ure
Date: 2009-01
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp0907.pdf (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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp0907

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Series data maintained by ().