【Brownbag】Exam Informativeness and Student-Program Matching in University Admissions
2025/12/12
研討會日期 : 2025-12-12
時間 : 12:10
主講人 : Professor Yu-Kuan Chen (陳語寬)
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Professor Yu-Kuan Chen received his Ph.D. in Economics from Rice University in 2024. He is currently an Assistant Professor at National Tsing Hua University. His research fields are Economics of Education, Labor Economics, and Applied Microeconomics.
演講摘要 : College admissions systems worldwide use standardized exams to match students to programs. While the matching literature recognizes that exam scores measure ability with error, it does not directly address the role of exam design in shaping the distribution of exam scores. However, the informativeness of exams—their ability to distinguish between high- and low-ability students—varies substantially due to test construction choices. This paper studies how exam design affects student-program match quality. Exam informativeness varies across subjects and years due to idiosyncratic test construction choices. University programs assign weights to exam subjects prior to learning the distributions of scores, creating differential exposure to exam informativeness shocks. Exploiting this variation in a shift-share design and combining data on exam score distributions with program-level dropout rates, I estimate how exam design affects matching outcomes in the high-stakes centralized admission system of Taiwan.
