published in: Investigaciones Económicas (2009), 23, 179-210.
This paper analyses the determinants of grades achieved in three core subjects by first-year Economics undergraduate students at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, over the period 2001-2005. Gender, nationality, type of school, specialization track at high school and the grades at the university entry exam are the key factors we examine. Our main findings are that those students who did a technical track at high school tend to do better in mathematics than those who followed a social sciences degree and, that the latter do not perform significantly better than the former in subjects with less degree of formalism and more economic content. Moreover, students from public schools are predominant in the lower (with social sciences or humanities tracks) and upper (with a technical track) parts of the grade distribution, and females tend to perform better than males.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.