Imagine two children with identical scores on their end-of-primary school test. One receives the highest school recommendation, while the other does not. The difference may partly come down to where they rank within their primary school classroom. New research by Max Coveney, Assistant Professor at Erasmus School of Economics, shows that even a small increase in a pupil's classroom rank raises the likelihood of receiving the highest recommendation, regardless of measured academic achievement.
In the Netherlands, pupils receive a teacher recommendation around age 12 that largely determines which secondary school track they can enter, making it a crucial moment in their educational trajectory. Coveney notes that these track decisions can have long-term consequences, as they shape which opportunities remain available later on. The study, “Teacher’s Pet: The Effect of Student Rank on Teacher Ability Beliefs”, forthcoming in the Journal of Human Resources, examines how a pupil’s ordinal position within their classroom influences the advice teachers give, even when pupils have the same level of academic achievement.
Classroom rank affects advice
The findings show that a 10-percentile increase in a pupil’s rank – roughly moving up three student places in classroom – increases the probability of receiving the highest academic track recommendation by about 2.5 percentage points. Crucially, this effect is independent of the child's actual ability, as measured by their Cito score.
As Coveney explains, the thought experiment is one of two identical students: ‘Though the two students have identical academic ability and achievement, one student happens to be in a classroom where they're the best student in relative terms. In the other classroom, there are a few more very talented kids as well, which means that the student is not quite at the top of their class.’ Despite being equally capable, they are likely to receive different track recommendations based on an arbitrary classroom feature of their classrooms.
Just as having a higher classroom rank increases the probability of receiving the top academic recommendation, the reverse also holds equally: a child who ranks lower in relation to their classmates faces a higher probability of receiving the lowest track recommendation.
The impact of classroom rank extends beyond the initial recommendation, as pupils with a higher rank are more likely to enter more demanding secondary school tracks. These early differences in rank continue to matter as students move through the education system and influence longer-term outcomes, including the likelihood of progressing to university.
Minority groups
The rank effect is not evenly distributed across all children. Teachers appear significantly more sensitive to the ranks of pupils from low socioeconomic backgrounds and minority ethnic groups when deciding which children are of lower academic ability. When a child from one of these groups finds themselves at the lower end of their classroom ranking, regardless of actual achievement, they are more likely to receive a lower track recommendation than a child with the same test scores from a higher socioeconomic background.
Possible explanations
The study carefully accounts for pupils’ cognitive skills, including detailed measures of academic performance. It also examines whether the effect could be explained by non-cognitive characteristics such as work ethic, self-confidence or behaviour in class. The results remain largely unchanged after taking these factors into account.
A possible explanation is that teachers use classroom rank as a mental shortcut when judging pupils’ abilities. Assessing a child’s absolute academic potential is difficult. Comparing pupils with one another is often easier, which may lead teachers to rely on ordinal information – who is near the top or bottom of the class – even when that information provides little additional insight into underlying ability. As Coveney puts it, teachers are trying to judge ‘absolute ability’, but can be influenced by ‘relative information’ that may ultimately be unimportant.
One may also expect that less experienced teachers could rely more heavily on these classroom comparisons. However, the study finds little evidence that experience removes the influence of rank, but rather the opposite: highly experienced teachers are found to rely even more on rank when deciding which pupils are of lower academic ability.
How was the study conducted?
Coveney analysed data from Statistics Netherlands (CBS) covering around 460,000 pupils from around 200,000 families and more than 5,200 primary schools between 2006 and 2021. The dataset included Cito scores, teacher recommendations, family background characteristics, and pupils' later educational outcomes, including the secondary school tracks they followed and whether they entered university.
He then tested the results using a second dataset, the PRIMA survey, which followed around 48,000 Dutch pupils between 1994 and 2005 and included detailed classroom information. The findings were consistent across both datasets, strengthening the evidence that classroom rank influences teachers' recommendations.
Implications for education policy
The findings suggest that teacher recommendations may partly reflect unimportant features of the classroom a pupil happens to be in, rather than only their academic abilities and competencies. Coveney notes that increasing awareness of these patterns or providing teachers with more tools to assess absolute performance could help reduce the influence of rank on these important decisions. ‘There is some existing evidence showing that if you inform teachers about their biases, some reversals can occur.’
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For more information, please contact Ronald de Groot, Media and Public Relations Officer at Erasmus School of Economics, rdegroot@ese.eur.nl, or +31 6 53 641 846.
