The High Stakes of Bad Exams

Each year two million secondary-school students across West Africa sit coordinated exams. Pass rates fluctuate enormously, fueling speculation about cheating and short-term policy changes. To investigate these hypotheses, we construct hybrid exams containing items spanning 2011-2019 and administer these to 4,380 students. Exam difficulty alone explains 80 percent of pass rate fluctuations in Ghana, while additional factors remain influential in Nigeria and elsewhere. Half of the candidates who failed mathematics in 2015 would have passed in 2019. Model based estimates imply that improving exam comparability would increase the Mincerian return to skills among secondary school graduates by 6 percentage points. JEL Classification: I25, I26, J24, O15, O55 * Jack Rossiter, Center for Global Development (jrossiter@cgdev.org). Might Kojo Abreh, Institute for Educational Planning and Administration, University of Cape Coast. Aisha Ali, Center for Global Development. Justin Sandefur, Center for Global Development. The data used in this article are available online: Rossiter et al. 2023. "Replication Data for: The High Stakes of Bad Exams". Harvard Dataverse. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/VM5BOQ. Our particular thanks to Francis Amedahe and seminar participants from the West African Exams Council. We thank Abdel Fuseini, Allan Barku, Baaba Sampson, Clemence Ayekple, Cyprian Ekow, Francis Ansah, James Amoateng, and Rita Denning who provided excellent research support. We also thank Abhijeet Singh, Alexis Le Nestour, Barbara Bruns, Caine Rolleston, Newman Burdett, William Smith, and anonymous referees for their helpful comments. The views expressed here should not be attributed to the Center for Global Development, the Institute for Educational Planning and Administration, or their funders. All errors are our own. This work was supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle, WA [grant number OPP1198125]. Other support summing to $10,000 in the past three years: Rossiter, Asian Development Bank, Echidna Giving, UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office; Abreh, none; Ali, none; Sandefur, Asian Development Bank, Centre for Effective Altruism, Echidna Giving, UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, Pousaz Philanthropies, World Bank Group. No party had the right to review the paper prior to its circulation. IRB approval: University of Cape Coast Institutional Review Board, UCCIRB/EXT/2019/37. doi:10.3368/jhr.0621-11739R1 This open access article is distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) and is freely available online at: http://jhr.uwpress.org by g ue st o n Ju ly 1 8, 2 02 3. C op yr ig ht 2 02 3 D ow nl oa de d fr om