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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…
Subjective teacher evaluations play a key role in shaping students' educational trajectories. Previous studies have shown that students of low socioeconomic status (SES) receive worse subjective evaluations than their high SES peers, even…
We study a game theoretic model of standardized testing for college admissions. Students are of two types; High and Low. There is a college that would like to admit the High type students. Students take a potentially costly standardized…
We propose a framework to assess how to optimally sort and grade students of heterogenous ability. Potential employers face uncertainty regarding an individual's productive value. Knowing which school an individual went to is useful for two…
In the UK, US and elsewhere, school accountability systems increasingly compare schools using value-added measures of school performance derived from pupil scores in high-stakes standardised tests. Rather than naively comparing school…
Assessments such as standardized tests and teacher evaluations of students' classroom participation are central elements of most educational systems. Assessments inform the student, parent, teacher, and school about the student learning…
I study the optimal design of ratings to motivate agent investment in quality when transfers are unavailable. The principal designs a rating scheme that maps the agent's quality to a (possibly stochastic) score. The agent has private…
We study the role of information and access in capacity-constrained selection problems with fairness concerns. We develop a statistical discrimination framework, where each applicant has multiple features and is potentially strategic. The…
Researchers addressing post-treatment complications in randomized trials often turn to principal stratification to define relevant assumptions and quantities of interest. One approach for estimating causal effects in this framework is to…
Score reliability is necessary for establishing a validity argument for an instrument, and is therefore highly important to investigate. Depending on the proposed instrument use and score interpretations, differing degrees of precision in…
We explore the fairness issue that arises in recommender systems. Biased data due to inherent stereotypes of particular groups (e.g., male students' average rating on mathematics is often higher than that on humanities, and vice versa for…
We examine a controlled school choice model where students are categorized into different types, and the distribution of these types within a school influences its priority structure. This study provides a general framework that integrates…
Colleges and universities use predictive analytics in a variety of ways to increase student success rates. Despite the potential for predictive analytics, two major barriers exist to their adoption in higher education: (a) the lack of…
This paper introduces a novel revealed-preference approach to ranking colleges and professional schools based on applicants' choices and standardized test scores. Unlike traditional rankings that rely on data supplied by institutions or…
Principal stratification is a framework for making sense of causal effects conditioned on variables that may themselves have been affected by the treatment. For instance, in an evaluation of an educational intervention, some subjects in the…
Fairness-aware learning aims to mitigate discrimination against specific protected social groups (e.g., those categorized by gender, ethnicity, age) while minimizing predictive performance loss. Despite efforts to improve fairness in…
Several countries successfully use centralized matching schemes for school or higher education assignment, or for entry-level labour markets. In this paper we explore the computational aspects of a possible similar scheme for assigning…
U.S. state education agencies mark schools displaying achievement gaps between demographic subgroups as needing improvement. Some schools may have few students in these subgroups, such that average end-of-year test scores only noisily…
Peer grading systems make large courses more scalable, provide students with faster and more detailed feedback, and help students to learn by thinking critically about the work of others. A key obstacle to the broader adoption of peer…
Recent and influential critiques of standardized testing have noted the existence of non-trivial numbers of successful scientists who received low scores on the GRE. Here we use computer simulations to show that the prevalence of such…