What Is The Vantage Of High School Curriculum

A high-school is going to institute a new curriculum, which, if effective, will increase the pro- portion of students who are adequately prepared to attend university. If ineffective, however, it will decrease the proportion of college ready students. The Principal (she) of the school is responsible for choosing a grading policy: a (possibly noisy) assessment of each student’s ability. The University (he), after observing applicants’ grades, admits students who are sufficiently likely to be adequately prepared. The Principal wants to maximize the number of students who are accepted to a university. This paper seeks to understand, from the vantage of a general framework, what is the Principal’s optimal grading mechanism and how does it depend …show more content…
The Principal prefers private revelation when where there exist distributions with a very high average student ability (for exam- ple, the curriculum is more than sufficient to ensure the average student will get admitted by the University, without further information). The intuition is thus. If such a curriculum was publicly reveled, the University’s perception of the average student, under a completely uninformative grad- ing policy, is higher than the threshold for acceptance. But notice, the size of the difference between the University’s belief and the threshold (i.e., the slack in the beliefs) does not affect the Princi- pal’s payoff—every student is getting accepted already. But, when the University is uniformed, the possibility of the curriculum being very high quality increases the ex-ante perception of the average student, allowing for a more persuasive grading policy. Moreover, this is true even if the curriculum is not actually of high quality, because the University still considers it possible. Of course, there is the caveat that the Principal does not inform the University, via the grading policy, about the curriculum, since this would nullify the value from keeping the University is