Shifting College Majors in Response to Advanced Placement Exam Scores

Christopher Avery, Oded Gurantz, Michael Hurwitz and Jonathan Smith

No 22841, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Mapping continuous raw scores from millions of Advanced Placement examinations onto the 1 to 5 integer scoring scale, we apply a regression discontinuity design to understand how students’ choice of college major is impacted by receiving a higher integer score despite similar exam performance to students who earned a lower integer score. Attaining higher scores increases the probability that a student will major in that exam subject by approximately 5 percent (0.64 percentage points), with some individual exams demonstrating increases in major choice by as much as 30 percent. These direct impacts of a higher score explain approximately 11 percent of the unconditional 64 percent (5.7 percentage points) gap in the probability of majoring in the same subject as the AP exam when attaining a 5 versus a 4. We estimate that a substantial portion of the overall effect is driven by behavioral responses to the positive signal of receiving a higher score.

JEL-codes: I2 I23 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu
Note: ED
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Published as Christopher Avery & Oded Gurantz & Michael Hurwitz & Jonathan Smith, 2018. "Shifting College Majors in Response to Advanced Placement Exam Scores," Journal of Human Resources, vol 53(4), pages 918-956.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22841.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Shifting College Majors in Response to Advanced Placement Exam Scores (2018)
Working Paper: Shifting College Majors in Response to Advanced Placement Exam Scores (2016)
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:nbr:nberwo:22841

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22841

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().