In this paper, we show that the design and decentralized, school-based scoring of New York’s high school exit exams – the Regents Examinations – led to the systematic manipulation of test sores just below important proficiency cutoffs. Our estimates suggest that teachers inflate approximately 40 percent of test scores near the proficiency cutoffs. Teachers are more likely to inflate the scores of high-achieving students on the margin, but low-achieving students benefit more from manipulation in aggregate due to the greater density of these students near the proficiency cutoffs. Exploiting a series of reforms that eliminated score manipulation, we find that inflating a student’s score to fall just above a cutoff increases his or her probability of graduating from high school by 27 percent. These results have important implications for educational attainment of marginal high school graduates. For example, we estimate that the black-white graduation gap is about 5 percent larger in the absence of test score manipulation.

中文翻译：

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考试成绩操纵的原因和后果：来自纽约摄政考试的证据

在本文中，我们展示了纽约高中毕业考试的设计和分散的、基于学校​​的评分 - 摄政考试 - 导致对低于重要熟练度临界值的测试疮的系统操作。我们的估计表明，教师在接近熟练程度临界值时夸大了大约 40% 的考试成绩。教师更有可能夸大成绩优异的学生的分数，但成绩差的学生总体上从操纵中获益更多，因为这些学生在熟练程度临界点附近的密度更大。利用一系列消除分数操纵的改革，我们发现将学生的分数提高到略高于临界值会使他或她从高中毕业的可能性增加 27%。这些结果对边缘高中毕业生的受教育程度具有重要意义。例如，我们估计在没有考试分数操纵的情况下，黑白毕业差距大约要大 5%。