TY  - JOUR
AB  - The effects of relative performance feedback on student achievement remain contested in the economics of education literature. Some studies find that providing students with information about their standing relative to peers improves academic outcomes, while others show negative effects driven by reduced effort among students who learn they perform better than expected. This paper provides new experimental evidence on the effectiveness of relative performance feedback in higher education. We conduct a pre-registered randomised controlled trial involving 386 undergraduate students across four degree programmes at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, Spain. Following a midterm exam, students in the treatment group receive information about their percentile ranking within the class, while those in the control group receive only their absolute scores. We estimate intent-to-treat effects on final exam performance and find that the treatment increases final exam scores by 0.41 points on a 0–10 scale when controlling for baseline performance and student characteristics, an improvement equivalent to 17% of a standard deviation. The intervention is particularly effective for students with lower baseline performance, female students, and those who do not receive additional tutoring. Exploiting a measure of the gap between students’ self-reported expected grade and their midterm performance, we further show that the treatment is concentrated among students who arrive at the intervention holding over-optimistic beliefs about their academic standing. Classifying students into pessimistic, accurate, and over-optimistic categories, over-optimistic students gain +0.67 points (p < 0.01), accurate students show an effect that is statistically indistinguishable from zero (−0.14), and pessimistic students display a negative point estimate (−0.43). These results show that relative performance feedback improves academic outcomes when delivered to students whose prior beliefs are misaligned with their realised performance, and that it can be implemented at low cost across higher education institutions.
AU  - Macías Domínguez, Cristian 
AU  - Santero Sánchez, Rosa 
AU  - Sanz Labrador, Ismael 
AU  - Tena, J.D. 
PY  - 2026
ST  - Does Relative Performance Feedback Improve Academic Outcomes? Evidence from a Randomised Controlled Trial in a Spanish University
TI  - Does Relative Performance Feedback Improve Academic Outcomes? Evidence from a Randomised Controlled Trial in a Spanish University
UR  - http://www.edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1504
ER  -