The Effect of Final Exam Spacing on Student Performance

In this paper, we examine the relationship between exam spacing and exam performance. Our approach exploits scheduling differences between two groups of undergraduate Economics students. The treatment group and the control group have similar exam spacing for one ‘early exam', but the treatment group has four additional days between exams for another ‘later exam'. We find that four more days of available study time is associated with an increase of 4.81 points (out of 100) on the final exam for females, while having no effect on the scores of males