Low-achieving students in many school districts are retained in a grade in order to allow them to gain the academic or social skills that teachers believe are necessary to succeed academically. This practice is highly controversial, with many researchers claiming that it leads to higher dropout...

"State requirements that high school graduates pass exit exams were the leading edge of the movement towards standards-based reform and continue to be adopted and refined by states today. In this study, we present new empirical evidence on how exit exams influenced educational attainment and...

In this paper, we show that the design and decentralized, school-based scoring of New York's high school exit exams – the Regents Examinations – led to the systematic manipulation of test sores just below important proficiency cutoffs. Our estimates suggest that teachers inflate...

This paper explores the phenomenon referred to as test score inflation, which occurs when achievement gains on quot;high-stakesquot; exams outpace improvements on quot;low-stakesquot; tests. The first part of the paper documents the extent to which student performance trends on state assessments...

State requirements that high school graduates pass exit exams were the leading edge of the movement towards standards-based reform and continue to be adopted and refined by states today. In this study, we present new empirical evidence on how exit exams influenced educational attainment and...