Top of the Class: The Importance of Ordinal Rank

Abstract

This article establishes a new fact about educational production: ordinal academic rank during primary school has lasting impacts on secondary school achievement that are independent of underlying ability. Using data on the universe of English school students, we exploit naturally occurring differences in achievement distributions across primary school classes to estimate the impact of class rank. We find large effects on test scores, confidence, and subject choice during secondary school, even though these students have a new set of peers and teachers who are unaware of the students’ prior ranking in primary school. The effects are especially pronounced for boys, contributing to an observed gender gap in the number of Maths courses chosen at the end of secondary school. Using a basic model of student effort allocation across subjects, we distinguish between learning and non-cognitive skills mechanisms, finding support for the latter.

First-Place Loving and Last-Place Loathing: How Rank in the Distribution of Performance Affects Effort Provision

“…In Freeman and Gelber (2010) and Bradler et al (forthcoming), feedback was unannounced and provided a single time. Finally, using observational data on school children, Murphy and Weinhardt (2014) and Elsner and Isphording (2015) find a correlation between rank in school and later educational achievement.…”

How Do Peers Impact Learning? An Experimental Investigation of Peer-to-Peer Teaching and Ability Tracking

“…In education,Murphy and Weinhardt [2014] andElsner and Isphording [2017] find that primary and secondary school rank has large effects on subsequent academic outcomes even after controlling for ability. They attribute their findings to the development of confidence and to the formation of expectations and perceptions about ability, respectively.…”

Class Rank and Long-Run Outcomes

“…We find that a student's rank in third grade impacts grade retention, test scores, AP course taking, high school graduation, college enrollment, and earnings up to 19 years later. 2 Academic achievement and rank are highly correlated and so we use the method developed in Murphy and Weinhardt (2014) to isolate the effect of a student's rank. To identify this effect, we use idiosyncratic variation in the distribution of test scores across schools, subjects, and cohorts.…”

“…Recent studies have documented that a student's relative rank matters independent of achievement to short run outcomes. Murphy and Weinhardt (2014) document the effect of primary school rank, independent of achievement, on high school test scores and confidence.…”

“…More recently there are a set currently unpublished working paper estimate the impact of rank within college on contemporaneous outcomes in various countries (Elsner et al 2018;Payne and Smith, 2018;Ribas et al 2018). 5 Murphy and Weinhardt (2014) consider the effect of rank on test score 3 and 5 years later. Elsner and Isphording (2017a) consider rank in high school on college enrollment and graduation-approximately 2 to 8 years later.…”