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February 8, 2017
Who wins when school systems eliminate corruption?
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When Oana Borcan was a student growing up in the Romanian education system, cheating was an open part of the culture. “Petty bribes were given in plain sight,” said Borcan, now an assistant professor at the University of East Anglia, in an interview with the AEA. She recalls friends with low grades who “suddenly” got good scores on national examinations.
Change came only when a cheating scandal involving batches of identical exam papers led to a national outcry in 2010. Reforms included harsher punishments, including prison time, for teachers caught taking bribes, and closed-circuit TV monitoring of exam centers to detect cases of blatant cheating.
In a study appearing in this month’s issue of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Borcan and two colleagues study the effect of these reforms on the Romanian school system. Did these two measures make examinations more fair and improve educational opportunities for those who couldn’t afford bribes?
portion of Figure 2 from Borcan et al. (2017)
Overall, the threat of harsher punishments succeeded in reducing scores on the tests as expected, especially when reinforced with television monitoring that made prosecution viable. But the figure above reveals a finding that surprised the researchers: the new, presumably more indicative test scores showed a bigger achievement gap between poor and nonpoor students, and they found that poor students saw worse outcomes in college applications after the reforms.
Widespread bribery would presumably give a leg up to students with money to spend, but evidently the culture of cheating was actually helping poor students more. Borcan says that this revelation is ultimately for the best. “When you know how large the problem of inequality truly is,” says Borcan, “you can start to take adequate measures to solve it.”