Since 1996, the Metropolitan Commission of Higher Secondary Education Institutions (COMIPEMS) has centralized admission to public higher secondary education in the Mexico City metropolitan area. The commission includes nine public education institutions that assign students to schools based on results obtained in a single standardized performance test.
In the middle of the school year, students completing the last year of middle school receive a booklet with a calendar setting out the application process in the corresponding institutions, along with a list of available schools and their basic characteristics (place, modality, specialty, if applicable). The COMIPEMS publishes on its website the past cutoff scores for each option in the previous three rounds.
Students are registered between the end of February and beginning of March. The admission exam takes place in June followed by allocation in July. The commission requires students to state their school preferences before taking the exam on the grounds that this helps them plan ahead for the supply of places in each school.
Additionally, the education system in Mexico offers three education modalities: General or Academic, which includes traditional schools focused on preparing students for higher education; Technical, which includes schools that cover most of the academic curriculum but also provide additional technical courses so that students can take technical jobs after completing high school; and Vocational, which trains students exclusively to become professional technicians.
There is evidence in the literature that points to the negative effect of overconfidence in the education area. This is important because young people's misperceptions about their own talent and skills can lead them to take decisions with high average returns, but low returns for the particular individual.
Since 1996, the Metropolitan Commission of Higher Secondary Education Institutions (COMIPEMS) has centralized admission to public higher secondary education in the Mexico City metropolitan area. The commission includes nine public education institutions that assign students to schools based on results obtained in a single standardized performance test.
In the middle of the school year, students completing the last year of middle school receive a booklet with a calendar setting out the application process in the corresponding institutions, along with a list of available schools and their basic characteristics (place, modality, specialty, if applicable). The COMIPEMS publishes on its website the past cutoff scores for each option in the previous three rounds.
Students are registered between the end of February and beginning of March. The admission exam takes place in June followed by allocation in July. The commission requires students to state their school preferences before taking the exam on the grounds that this helps them plan ahead for the supply of places in each school.
Additionally, the education system in Mexico offers three education modalities: General or Academic, which includes traditional schools focused on preparing students for higher education; Technical, which includes schools that cover most of the academic curriculum but also provide additional technical courses so that students can take technical jobs after completing high school; and Vocational, which trains students exclusively to become professional technicians.
There is evidence in the literature that points to the negative effect of overconfidence in the education area. This is important because young people's misperceptions about their own talent and skills can lead them to take decisions with high average returns, but low returns for the particular individual.The experiment focuses on a sub-sample of potential applicants from the most vulnerable neighborhoods. These students are less likely to have access to prior information on their academic potential. Although preparatory courses are relatively popular in this context, the offering is mainly private and requires an expense that the poorest students cannot always cover.
The experiment administers a version of the admission test provided by the researchers and generates subjective probability distributions (both before and after) of individual performance, being especially careful to measure the first two moments of the belief distribution to test the specific predictions derived from a simple path choice model with Bayesian agents.
The design also includes a pure control group of aspirants who did not take the test in order to distinguish the effect of taking it and the effect of receiving feedback on performance. The results are communicated to a subset of the students to observe how the clash of information affects their expectations of subjective academic ability, the choice of type of school and then their educational trajectories.
Secondary students who are about to enter High School.
The experiment aimed to align personal expectations with reality and improve the higher education decision.
Results
There are important discrepancies between real and expected performance in the exam. Providing feedback on individual performance in the exam substantially reduces this gap. Consistent with the Bayesian update, applicants who receive negative (positive) feedback on their expectations before the treatment adjust their subsequent average beliefs downward (upward), and this effect is more pronounced for students who have a higher initial bias. Regardless of the direction of the update, the treatment reduces the dispersion in the individual belief distribution.
The experiment also found an increase in the percentage of academic schools in the portfolio of applicants who receive positive feedback and live in municipalities with less strict graduation requirements. It also found a symmetric reduction in demand for academic options among applicants who receive negative feedback and who live in municipalities with more stringent graduation requirements.
In general, providing feedback changes the preferences revealed in the education modalities which leads to a higher correlation between academic ability, measured by the individual score on the exam set by the researchers, and the proportion of academic schools chosen. Moreover, these changes in preferences translate into outcomes of actual allocation to schools through the mechanism used by Mexico City. In addition, dropout rates at the end of the first year in high school tend to fall for applicants affected by the intervention, although this effect is not statistically significant.