Doing it Twice, Getting in Right? The Effects of Grade Retention and Course Repetition in Higher Education

Summary, in English

Many students who enter college are insufficiently prepared to follow a demanding college-level curriculum. Thus, higher education institutions often require low-performing students to repeat failed courses, a full term, or even a full year. This paper is the first to investigate the effects of such a “(grade) retention” policy on student performance in higher education. We study a setting where first-year undergraduates who fall short of a pre-defined performance requirement have to repeat all first-year courses before they can proceed to the second year. To determine the causal effect of retention and repetition on student performance, we apply a sharp regression discontinuity design to administrative data from a Swiss university. Based on a sample of 5000 students, we find that grade retention increases dropout probabilities after the first year by about 10 percentage points. Repetition of a full year persistently boosts grade point averages by about 0.5 standard deviations, but does not affect study pace and major choices.

• Author: Petra Thiemann; Darjusch Tafreschi
• Publishing year: 2016
• Language: English
• Pages: 198-219
• Publication/Series: Economics of Education Review
• Volume: 55
• Links: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2016.10.003
• Document type: Journal article
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Topic: Economics
• Keywords: Grade retention; Course repetition; Higher education; Dropout; Academic achievement; Regression discontinuity; I21; I23; J24
• Status: Published
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 1873-7382