Taking PISA Seriously: How Accurate are Low Stakes Exams?

Pelin Akyol, Kala Krishna () and Jinwen Wang

No 24930, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: PISA is seen as the gold standard for evaluating educational outcomes worldwide. Yet, being a low-stakes exam, students may not take it seriously resulting in downward biased scores and inaccurate rankings. This paper provides a method to identify and account for non-serious behavior in low-stakes exams by leveraging information in computer-based assessments in PISA 2015. We compare the score/rankings with no corrections to those generated using the PISA approach as well as our method which fully corrects for the bias. We show that the total bias is large and that the PISA approach corrects for only about half of it.

JEL-codes: C53 I20 I21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-08
Note: DEV ED LS
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Published as Pelin Akyol & Kala Krishna & Jinwen Wang, 2021. "Taking PISA Seriously: How Accurate are Low-Stakes Exams?," Journal of Labor Research, Springer, vol. 42(2), pages 184-243, June.

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Journal Article: Taking PISA Seriously: How Accurate are Low-Stakes Exams? (2021)
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