Using "Cheat Sheets" to Distinguish Ability from Knowledge: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial in Chile

Sandro Díez-Amigo

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: According to the existing evidence some higher education admission tests may be screening out students who, despite a relative lack of specific knowledge, possess as much intellectual ability as their peers. If this is the case, students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds are likely to be disproportionately affected, since they generally receive a primary and secondary education of worse quality than their better-off peers, often resulting in significant knowledge gaps. Also, although in some cases these formative shortcomings might be too large to be feasibly addressed at the time of enrollment in higher education, it is plausible to think that in some cases they may perhaps be relatively easy to remedy. In view of all this, in this paper I present a diagnostics experiment, aimed at helping to better understand this issue. In particular, I custom-designed a multiple-choice test, intended to measure an individual's mathematical ability, while minimizing the reliance on previously acquired knowledge. Also, I put together a two page "cheat sheet", which outlined all the necessary concepts to successfully complete the exam, without providing any explicit answers. This test was subsequently used to evaluate the candidates applying for admission into a special access program at one of the leading Chilean universities. A staged randomized control trial was used to measure the difference in academic performance (i.e. number of correctly answered questions) across the three parts of the exam between students who received a "cheat sheet" after the first or second parts of the test, respectively. As expected, "cheat sheets" improved the average performance of candidates on the exam, but their impact varied considerably across individuals. Most importantly, "cheat sheets" proved significantly more beneficial (in terms of improved test performance) to those students who were more likely to have had a secondary education of lower quality. This result has important implications for educational policies in Chile and elsewhere, suggesting that a transition to ability-focused admission tests would facilitate the access to higher education for talented students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Keywords: Equality of Opportunity; Higher Education; Education Policy; Policy Evaluation; Economic Development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A12 I2 J15 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-06-10, Revised 2014-08-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/62914/1/MPRA_paper_62914.pdf original version (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:pra:mprapa:62914

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().