Abstract
In this paper, we show how results in state administered university entrance standardized exams in Portugal are sensitive to the electoral cycle. Using individual data for all senior high school students taking national exams between the years 2004 and 2018, we reveal that whenever exams occur in years of upcoming legislative elections, the average senior high-school student grade increases by 1.17 and 0.63—on a 0 to 20 scale, in the core disciplines of Mathematics and Portuguese, respectively. Furthermore, the probability of passing the exams, that is, of getting more than 9.5 out of 20, increases by ten and eight percentage points in those same exams. Neither the quality of students nor the leniency of grading in these years explain this rise in pre-election exam grades. Robustness tests using early legislative elections, held, exceptionally, before national exams, and therefore not anticipated by those who arguably manipulate the exams, show that there was no inflation of exam scores in those years. Furthermore, we highlight that exam inflation can be a powerful electoral tool, with a unit increase in the municipality average score in Mathematics and Portuguese exams associated with a 1.46 percentage point rise in the vote share of the sitting government.
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Notes
National Portuguese exams are administered every year, with the first exam period occurring in the 2nd half of June. Legislative elections are held during the last week of September, or the first week of October, with the rare exception of early elections.
National exam scores are published every year, and the rankings of the best schools are broadcast in the country’s main media outlets (for more information regarding the impact that the publication of those rankings has on students and their families, see Nunes, Reis and Seabra 2015).
Students who choose languages and humanities or arts as a field of study in secondary school are not required to take the national 12th grade mathematics exam.
Figure A2 supports the conclusion: no significant increase is evident in the growth rate of the number of exams taken after 2012. A possible reason explaining this result is that this policy is binding only on students who would drop out before the 12 years of schooling if possible, but these are the students least likely to reach the secondary national exams, with or without this policy.
A similar procedure was followed in several other studies, namely, Cerdeira et al. (2018).
It always is advantageous for students with an internal grade below 10, to cancel their enrolments. That being the case, most external students are expected to fall in the left-hand tail of the score distribution.
Our final dataset contains about 73% of the observations from the initial dataset.
The HHI is computed, for each municipality, and for each year, as the sum of the squared school’s student shares: \({HHI}_{mt}\)=\(\sum_{i=1}^{NSM}{\left({s}_{it}\right)}^{2}\), where \({s}_{it}\)= \(\frac{EXAM{S}_{it}}{\sum_{i=1}^{NSM}EXAM{S}_{it}}\); \(EXAM{S}_{it}\) is the number of exams taken at school \(i\), in year \(t,\mathrm{ and }NSM\) is the total number of schools in the municipality.
We also entered individual dummies for all years in our model. The results, presented in Table A4, show that the average of the estimated coefficients of the dummies for the predetermined legislative election years is statistically larger than the average coefficients of the remaining years.
Table A8 supports the findings, estimating that forthcoming legislative elections have larger effects on decisive grades, i.e., those closer to the pass–fail cutoff point.
Even though we are unable to link 9th grade to 12th grade exam scores individually, we took advantage of the fact that most students taking 12th grade exams in a certain year also took 9th grade exams three years before (except for those who were held back during that period).
An in-depth analysis of the distribution of exam scores, presented in Figure A3, reveals a much smaller occurrence of scores just under, rather than above, the cutoff point. That specially is the case for the pass–fail grade, since a student must have earned at least 9.5 (out of 20) on the exam to be eligible for a university in Portugal.
Anecdotal evidence of the sentiment that exam scores increase in election years is indeed abundant in newspapers and the blogs of professors. They include news stating that average exam scores increased or that exams were easier than usual (see Samuel Silva, “Mathematics and Portuguese average exam scores increased”, Público, July 12, 2009, https://www.publico.pt/2019/07/12/sociedade/noticia/notas-exames-portugues-matematica-melhoraram-1879673 (accessed 26 December 2019); or Graça Barbosa Ribeiro and Juliana Martins, “Mathematics national exam was much easier than last year”, Público, June 23, 2015, https://www.publico.pt/2015/06/23/sociedade/noticia/exame-de-matematica-foi-muito-mais-facil-que-o-do-ano-passado-1699859 (accessed 26 December 2019)).
In order to prevent the same municipality appearing both below and above the median subsamples in different years, we split the sample according to 2005 values.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank William F. Shughart II, Pete Leeson (editors), two anonymous reviewers, Pedro Brinca, João Carvalho, João Duarte, Pedro Freitas, Catherine Michaud Leclerc, Luís Catela Nunes, João Vaz Patto, Miguel Portela, Ricardo Reis, Dina Rodrigues, Susana Peralta, Alexander Coutts, Pedro Vicente, Cora Wigger, and participants at the Graduate Students in Economics of Education Zoom (GEEZ) seminar, and the workshop on Empirical Public and Political Economics (KU Leuven) for their helpful comments and suggestions. This work used infrastructure and resources funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (UID/ECO/00124/2013, UID/ECO/00124/2019 and Social Sciences DataLab, Project 22209), POR Lisboa (LISBOA-01-0145-FEDER-007722 and Social Sciences DataLab, Project 22209) and POR Norte (Social Sciences DataLab, Project 22209). João Pereira dos Santos gratefully acknowledges financial support by FCT—PD/BD/128121/2016.
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Pereira dos Santos, J., Tavares, J. & Mesquita, J. Leave them kids alone! National exams as a political tool. Public Choice 189, 405–426 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-021-00893-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-021-00893-y