Marathon, Hurdling or Sprint? The Effects of Exam Scheduling on Academic Performance

Sofoklis Goulas and Rigissa Megalokonomou

No 11624, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Would you prefer a tighter or a prolonged exam schedule? Would you prefer to take Math before Reading or the other way around? We exploit variation in end-of-course exam schedules across years and grades to identify distinct effects of the number of days between exams, the number of days since the first exam, and the exam order on subsequent performance. We find substantially different scheduling effects between STEM and non-STEM subjects. First, we find a positive relationship between exam performance in STEM subjects and exam order, controlling for other influences of scheduling, suggesting that the later in the schedule an exam is taken the higher the average performance. We call this phenomenon, exam warm-up. Second, we find a negative relationship between the number of days from the very first exam and subsequent exam performance in STEM subjects, suggesting the existence of a fatigue effect. For STEM subjects, the fatigue effect is estimated to be less than half the size of the warm-up effect. For non-STEM subjects, an additional day between exams is significantly associated with lower performance in subsequent exams. Students of lower prior performance have lower fatigue effects and higher warm-up effects in STEM subjects compared to students of higher prior performance. Also, we find that exam productivity in STEM increases faster for boys than it does for girls as they take additional exams due to a higher warm-up effect. Our findings suggest that low-cost changes in the exam schedule may have salient effects on student performance gaps.

Keywords: exam schedule; cognitive fatigue; exam warm-up; practice; gender gap; STEM subjects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 I24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 51 pages
Date: 2018-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published - published in: B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 2020, 20 (2), 20190177.

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp11624.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Marathon, Hurdling, or Sprint? The Effects of Exam Scheduling on Academic Performance (2020)
Journal Article: Marathon, Hurdling, or Sprint? The Effects of Exam Scheduling on Academic Performance (2020)
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:iza:izadps:dp11624

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().