1 The Value of Class Effort in Grade Determination
Can the amount of effort exerted in the classroom be an effective criteria used to evaluate student performance? Does the perceived performance of those around us affect our individual effort in the classroom? This paper examines these two questions and uses the framework of public choice theory to explain why effort sometimes is a poor predictor of academic performance. The literature on the impact of effort on academic performance is surprisingly scarce for higher education. Two studies (Schuman et al 1985 and Michaels and Miethe 1989) used a random sample of 424 and 676 undergraduates respectively. The Schuman et al (1985) study (1) used hours studied under different time frames as a gauge of effort while the Michaels and Miethe (1989) study (2) used quantitative and qualitative measures to gauge effort. The Schuman et al (1985) study found no relationship between hours studied and grades, while the Michaels and Miethe (1989) study only found a positive relationship for freshmen and sophomores. Few studies seem to focus on the role that class effort plays in determining academic performance. While in the field of educational psychology, empirical studies of primary and secondary school students have shown that effort is a key indicator of academic outcomes, these samples usually contain students at two extremes. These extremes are those who care excessively about studies and hence put in a lot of effort and those who do not care at all and therefore put in little effort. The literature postulating why Asians do better on the whole compared to their non-Asian counterparts especially in the United States posits effort as a key explanatory variable (see Dornbusch et al 1987; Schneider and Lee 1990; Sue and Okazaki 1990), however many of these studies also contain extreme outliers in their samples. In previous studies with samples of students who obviously care about grades, no strong relationship between the amount of time spent studying and final year end grade was found, controlling for socio-economic status (S ES) (see Cheo 2002, Fejgin 1995).
Yet effort can have many indirect effects that may explain the lack of direct correlation with academic outcomes. The presence of externality effects from high achievers to lower achievers highlights the role that knowledge and effort plays in the modem classroom. A significant amount of research has focused on the issue of the "peer group" effect in recent economic analysis of education. Education economists such as Manski (1992), Nechyba (1999), Ferris (2002) and Johnson (2002) have done studies that highlight the spillover effects that higher achievers tend to generate within a classroom learning environment to increase the overall quality of education for all students.
Knowledge need not necessarily be communicated explicitly, i.e. the high achiever tutors the low achiever, but may be communicated as a social norm for performance. Consider this non-academic example: a young boy who idolizes an elite basketball player is likely to mimic his idol's work ethic and actions. A further explanation can be found in Marks (2002). His explanation is that academic standards operate like social norms which exhibit public good characteristics. 'Academic standards' help identify the quality of academic performance (e.g. a grading system or peer review) but the benefit they confer strongly resembles a public good. In our setting, the norm would then be to participate actively in class, however since participation itself requires personal cost while conveying benefits to non-participants, this would lead to free-riding and an inefficient production of this norm.
To illustrate this, a previous study by Summers and Wolfe (1977) used differences in composite achievement scores between grade three and grade six as a measure of schools' value added and found that an increase in the percentage of high achievers in a student's school has two offsetting effects on student scores: one that significantly improves all students' scores and a second that reduces individual scores by an amount that correlates with student ability. Marks' (2002) interpretation of the externality effect of class participation as a public good could account for Summers and Wolfe's (1977) finding of an offsetting effect that reduces individual scores according to ability. Once knowledge is surrendered in a classroom via a written or oral presentation, homework or even a set of well-written notes, it can be available at almost no cost to the other members of the class, subject to memory and time constraints. This externality may be negative or positive depending on how competitive the class environmen t is in assessing the quality of knowledge freely propagated.
2 How Competitive is the Environment?
To summarize the earlier section: greater effort in the classroom does not necessarily lead to higher marks (direct causality); instead it may convey externality effects to other people. A competitive environment ensures that all observable information prior to decision-making correctly reflects the market value of such knowledge. In this way, misperception is not a significant problem. To maintain such a classroom environment necessitates the facilitator, usually the teacher, to openly critique students' contributions in the form of highlighting useful knowledge and downplaying the bad. Without adequate feedback to students, it is possible that lecturers or tutors who had originally assumed that their charges were learning what they were trying to teach, will be regularly faced with disappointing results from exams.
In a competitive environment where the transfer of knowledge is almost costless, in terms of dollars and cents, positive externality effects from class participation that spill over to the rest of the non-contributing class creates the problem of free-riding. Class participation incurs a personal cost in terms of time and effort and once information is revealed it becomes common property, on which any member in the class can free-ride. A common example would be if every student writes the same analysis in an exam, on which only the original contributor of the idea actually spent time and effort to formulate the argument, and all members of the class still get the same grade. Since individual effort to contribute information to the class benefits all members in the class, there is a tendency for each member in a class to not participate, in the hopes that someone else will altruistically surrender his/her time and effort to procure information that will be made freely available. This ultimately removes the inc entive to participate completely and leads to self-absorbed or selfish learning. A later stage game may even involve the appearance of altruism and the feeding of misinformation in the hopes of undermining other students' performance.
Herein lies the dilemma. The modem classroom is designed specifically to utilize externality effects in the learning process, be it group work, individual presentations or even an informal ranking schedule of ability across the students. However the problem of free riding will ultimately cause these externality effects to diminish, until self-interest overwhelms the desire to participate in class. This paper reports an experimental design used to test this hypothesis as well as adopts a rule to encourage externality effects through the pressure of a social norm as highlighted by Marks (2002).
3 The Role of Peer Review
In the literature the use of peer review has not been without its critics. Although in theory, peer review is seen as a useful form of feedback (see Popham 1995), empirically, even an expert audience finds it hard to agree on what constitutes "good" or "bad". For example, Rothwell and Martyn (2000) found that two neuroscience journals when evaluating the same journal articles had a dismal record of agreement. The use of peer review in this paper is not intended for the purpose of evaluating the true effectiveness of the method, but as a means to subjectively measure students' perceived gains from spillovers in classroom discussions. Whether it has a positive or negative effect on academic grades depends on the quality of the spillover. The peer scores used in gauging effort removed all self-assessed scores in order to remove self-reporting biases. It is maintained that what is important in this study is mainly to preserve the relative ranking of student effort (3) rather than an aggregation of individual peer ratings.
4 Experimental Design: The Use of Peer Reviews to Gauge Effort
