By Thomas S. Dee, Will Dobbie, Brian A. Jacob, and Jonah Rockoff∗
We show that the design and decentralized scoring of New York’s high school exit exams – the Regents Examinations – led to system- atic manipulation of test scores just below important proficiency cutoffs. Exploiting a series of reforms that eliminated score manip- ulation, we find heterogeneous effects of test score manipulation on academic outcomes. While inflating a score increases the probabil- ity of a student graduating from high school by about 17 percentage points, the probability of taking advanced coursework declines by roughly 10 percentage points. We argue that these results are con- sistent with test score manipulation helping less advanced students on the margin of dropping out but hurting more advanced students that are not pushed to gain a solid foundation in the introductory material.
In the United States and across the globe, educational quality is increasingly measured using standardized test scores. These standardized test results can carry extremely high stakes for both students and educators, often influencing grade retention, high school graduation, school closures, and teacher and administrator pay. The tendency to place high stakes on student test scores has led to concerns among both researchers and policymakers about the fidelity of standardized test results (e.g., National Research Council 2011, Neal 2013). A particular concern is that the consequences associated with these tests can sometimes lead to outright cheating as evidenced by incidents such as the 2009 cheating scandal in Atlanta.1