Class Attendance and Exam Performance: A Randomized Experiment

Abstract

The study of determinants of a college student’s academic performance is an important \r\nissue in higher education. Among all factors, whether or not attending lectures affects a \r\nstudent’s exam performance has received considerable attention. In this paper, we conduct a \r\nrandomized experiment to study the average attendance effect for students who have chosen to \r\nattend lectures, which is the so-called the average treatment effect on the treated in program \r\nevaluation literature. This effect has long been neglected by researchers when estimating the \r\nimpact of lecture attendance on students’ academic performance. Under the randomized \r\nexperiment approach, least squares, fixed effects, and random effects models all yield similar \r\nestimates for the average treatment effect on the treated. We find that, class attendance has \r\nproduced a positive and significant impact on students’ exam performance. On average, \r\nattending lecture corresponds to a 7.66% improvement in exam performance.