In several countries, students who fail end-of-high-school high-stakes exams are faced with the choice of retaking them or forgoing postsecondary education. We explore exogenous variation generated by a 2006 policy that imposed a performance threshold for admission into postsecondary education in Greece to estimate the effect of retaking exams on a range of outcomes. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design and novel administrative data, we find that low-achieving students who retake national exams improve their performance by half a standard deviation, but do not receive offers from higher quality postsecondary placements. The driving mechanism for these results stems from increased competition.
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.