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This study examines the causal impact of being placed on the Dean's List, a positive education incentive, on future student performance using a regression discontinuity design. The results suggest that for students with low prior academic…
University dropout remains a persistent challenge in higher education systems, yet causal evidence on the mechanisms triggering early disengagement is limited. This study estimates the causal effect of first-time academic failure on…
Course selection is a crucial activity for students as it directly impacts their workload and performance. It is also time-consuming, prone to subjectivity, and often carried out based on incomplete information. This task can, nevertheless,…
A growing number of authorities use mechanisms to allocate students to schools in a way that reflects student preferences and school priorities. However, most real-world mechanisms incentivize students to strategically misreport their…
Higher educational institutions constantly look for ways to meet students' needs and support them through graduation. Recent work in the field of learning analytics have developed methods for grade prediction and course recommendations.…
This paper analyzes the effects of educational tracking and the quality of track assignment decisions. We motivate our analysis using a model of optimal track assignment under uncertainty. This model generates predictions about the average…
We extend the continuity-based framework to Regression Discontinuity Designs (RDDs) to identify and estimate causal effects under interference when units are connected through a network. Assignment to an "effective treatment," combining the…
Many schools in large urban districts have more applicants than seats. Centralized school assignment algorithms ration seats at over-subscribed schools using randomly assigned lottery numbers, non-lottery tie-breakers like test scores, or…
Leveraging unique insights into the special education placement process through written individual psychological records, I present results from the first ever study to examine short- and long-term returns to special education programs with…
A growing number of universities worldwide use various forms of online and blended learning as part of their academic curricula. Furthermore, the recent changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have led to a drastic increase in importance…
One of the long term goals of any college or university is increasing the student retention. The negative impact of student dropout are clear to students, parents, universities and society. The positive effect of decreasing student…
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants are increasingly used for aligning language models with human preferences. Although these methods are designed to teach a model to generate preferred responses more frequently relative…
Math placement is a crucial step between admission and full engagement with the university for students in STEM majors. Students' placement experiences influence not only their mathematical entry point on their degree pathway, but their…
Students' decisions on whether to take a class are strongly affected by whether their friends plan to take the class with them. A student may prefer to be assigned to a course they likes less, just to be with their friends, rather than…
The paper focuses on identifying the causes of student performance to provide personalized recommendations for improving pass rates. We introduce the need to move beyond predictive models and instead identify causal relationships. We…
Each year, selective American colleges sort through tens of thousands of applications to identify a first-year class that displays both academic merit and diversity. In the 2023-2024 admissions cycle, these colleges faced unprecedented…
In higher education, data is collected that indicate the term(s) that a course is taken and when it is passed. Often, study plans propose a suggested course order to students. Study planners can adjust these based on detected deviations…
Detecting abnormal behaviors of students in time and providing personalized intervention and guidance at the early stage is important in educational management. Academic performance prediction is an important building block to enabling this…
The past decade has seen a growth in the development and deployment of educational technologies for assisting college-going students in choosing majors, selecting courses and acquiring feedback based on past academic performance. Grade…
In a pilot program during the 2016-17 admissions cycle, the University of California, Berkeley invited many applicants for freshman admission to submit letters of recommendation. We use this pilot as the basis for an observational study of…