Do High-Stakes Exams Widen Gender Gaps in Early Adolescence? Evidence from a Middle-School Exit Exam Reform

Annalisa Loviglio, Veronica Rattini and Federico Stronati

Working Papers from Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna

Abstract: Do high-stakes exams widen gender gaps in academic performance? We study this question in early adolescence using Italy's lower-secondary exit exam. A 2017 reform removed the national standardized test from the final grade while preserving the requirement to take the same test, reducing stakes without changing content. Using administrative data on the full population of students and a difference-in-differences design, we compare gender gaps before and after the reform. We find no evidence that higher stakes disadvantage girls. If anything, girls perform slightly better relative to boys when the test has exam stakes, suggesting gender differences under pressure emerge later in education.

JEL-codes: I21 I24 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-05
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://amsacta.unibo.it/8960/1/WP1223.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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bol:bodewp:wp1223

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna ().