Magdalena Bennett, Christopher A. Neilson, Christopher Neilson, Nicolás Rojas Souyet, "Balancing Accountability: Regulating with Test-Based Standards Without Overreach", Work in progress, 2026.

@article{ balancing-accountability_2026,
  title = "Balancing Accountability: Regulating with Test-Based Standards Without Overreach",
  author = "Bennett, Magdalena and Neilson, Christopher A. and Neilson, Christopher and Souyet, Nicolás Rojas",
  journal = "Work in progress",
  year = "2026",
  note = "wip"
,
  abstract = "High-stakes testing is widely used across educational systems, shaping accountability, resource allocation, and school choice. While skewed attendance may undermine these goals, little is known about its impact beyond the exclusion of low-performing students. Using an event-study design and rich administrative data from Chile, this paper examines how testing affects student attendance across grades and performance levels. The authors find highly heterogeneous effects—ranging from −8 to 4 percentage points across the GPA distribution. These effects are negative only among younger, low-performing students, and positive for higher-performing students. The study rules out student-exemption policies and test anxiety as mechanisms, identifying communication, prizes, and grading incentives as explanations. It also highlights the limits of multiple imputation and proposes a machine-learning approach to detect non-representative attendance patterns."
,
  url_article = ""
}