The Impact of High School Exit Exams on Graduation Rates and Achievement

Katherine Caves () and Simone Balestra ()
Additional contact information
Simone Balestra: Department of Business Administration, University of Zurich

No 346, Working Papers from University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW)

Abstract: In this paper, we examine the long-term effects of high school exit exams (HSEEs)on graduation rates and achievement using an interrupted time series approach.We find that introducing a HSEE has an overall positive effect on graduation rate trends, an effect which is heterogeneous over time. In the year of introduction and the following three years we find a negative impact of HSEE on graduation rates; this negative impact is short-lived and becomes positive over the long term. We perform robustness checks using states that do not have HSEEs as control group. We also estimate a pre-intervention negative effect, suggesting that high schools start preparing for the HSEE before its actual introduction. We find no effects for achievement, possibly due to the lack of meaningful cross-state achievement data in the time period studied.

Keywords: High school exit exams; graduation rates; achievement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C33 I21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2014-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.business.uzh.ch/RePEc/zrh/wpaper/346_IBW_full.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The impact of high school exit exams on graduation rates and achievement (2018)
Working Paper: The Impact of High School Exit Exams on Graduation Rates and Achievement (2014)
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:zrh:wpaper:346

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Daniela Koller ().