The devil's in the details: evidence from the GED on large effects of small differences in high stakes exams [An article from: Economics of Education Review]

This digital document is a journal article from Economics of Education Review, published by Elsevier in 2004. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
As part of standards-based educational reform efforts, more than 40 states will soon require students to achieve passing scores on standardized exams in order to obtain a high school diploma. Currently, many states are struggling with the design of their examination systems, debating such questions as which subjects should be tested, what should be the minimum passing scores, and what should be the rules regarding options for failing students to retake the exams. In this paper, we use data from a long-standing examination system, the General Educational Development (GED) exams, to illustrate the importance of the answers to these questions to both the number and composition of passers. We show that, among school dropouts in Florida and Texas who attempted the GED examinations, the option of retaking the examination upon initial failure was especially important for dropouts of color, and that the mathematics exam posed the greatest obstacle to females and the writing exam to males. We also show that an increase in the passing standard had a marked short-run impact on the number of school dropouts in Texas who attempted the GED exams, but that the number of test-takers recovered over several years.