Exhausting exams: the wellbeing effects of compulsory retakes

Robbie Maris (), Jake Anders (), Tammy Campbell () and Gill Wyness ()
Additional contact information
Robbie Maris: UCL Centre for Education Policy & Equalising Opportunities
Jake Anders: UCL Centre for Education Policy & Equalising Opportunities
Tammy Campbell: Education Policy Institute
Gill Wyness: UCL Centre for Education Policy & Equalising Opportunities

No 26-08, CEPEO Working Paper Series from UCL Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities

Abstract: Policies that require low-attaining students to continue investing in foundational skills may generate future human-capital benefits but also impose short-run psychological costs. We study this trade-off using England's compulsory GCSE English and mathematics resit requirement. Using longitudinal survey data from the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), we estimate the effect of exposure to England's compulsory resit requirement on adolescent wellbeing, controlling for cognitive ability, prior wellbeing and a rich set of demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. We conduct a cross-country falsification test using Wales and Northern Ireland, where students also take GCSEs but face no comparable national resit requirement. We find that exposure to the requirement lowers wellbeing at age 17 by approximately 0.11 SDs. These effects are about exposure to retakes at the extensive margin - we find no evidence of an additional penalty for retaking in multiple subjects. Our average estimates conceal substantial heterogeneity: English resitting is associated with lower wellbeing among boys, while mathematics resitting is associated with lower wellbeing among girls. For boys resitting English, the negative estimates are concentrated among students further below the pass threshold, consistent with a discouragement mechanism; for girls resitting mathematics, they are concentrated among those who narrowly miss the threshold, consistent with a near-miss penalty. The results identify a potentially important non-pecuniary cost of compulsory remedial education and highlight a trade-off between policies designed to raise foundational skills and adolescent wellbeing.

Keywords: resits; remedial education; human capital; mental health; education policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 I21 I28 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 76 pages
Date: 2026-08, Revised 2026-08
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repec-cepeo.ucl.ac.uk/cepeow/cepeowp26-08.pdf Initial version, 2026 (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:ucl:cepeow:26-08

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPEO Working Paper Series from UCL Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jake Anders ().