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A new indicator for higher education student performance

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An Erratum to this article was published on 21 June 2015

Abstract

The debate on academic achievement is a heated issue that involves all the higher education contexts. This paper attempts to provide an indicator that can make the measurement of university student performance easier and that can be easily applied to different systems, making comparisons more fair. The Italian University System is used as a starting point to make several considerations on the current measures and to build up a new performance indicator. Then, a generalization for other marking systems is shown and finally a quantile regression is performed to investigate some determinants of the new performance indicator, also with respect to the current one.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank the anonymous referees for their valuable comments which improved the quality and the clarity of the manuscript, and Leonardo Grilli (University of Florence) for his useful hints. The article is the result of the productive collaboration among the authors. In particular, “Introduction” and “Final remarks and future developments” sections can be ascribed to Vincenza Capursi, “The current Italian performance measure” section can be ascribed to Giovanni Boscaino, “The new indicator for student performance: a generalization to other marking systems” section can be ascribed to Giada Adelfio and Giovanni Boscaino, and “The proposed indicator and the determinants of student performance” section can be ascribed to Giada Adelfio.

This paper has been supported by Italian Ministerial grant “Misure e modelli per la valutazione del Sistema Universitario”, n. 2012-ATE-0454

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Giada, A., Giovanni, B. & Vincenza, C. A new indicator for higher education student performance. High Educ 68, 653–668 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-014-9737-x

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