The Impact of Grade Incentives and Gender on Student Performance: An Experiment

Abstract

This experiment was conducted to determine the impact of grade incentives and gender on student performance at the university level. We perform a two-way analysis of variance on a sample of three groups of students taking a first-year core mathematics course and another three groups taking a fourth-year compulsory accounting course. We find that grade incentives significantly affect student performance for both sampled courses across all six groups. Gender is found to significantly affect the performance of mathematics students, but not of accounting students. The interaction between gender and grade incentives does not have a significant impact on performance in either experiment.