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Motivating Students What Is the Effect of the BSA System on Students?

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Motivating Students What Is the Effect of the BSA System on Students? Motivating students What is the effect of the BSA system on students? By Sam Verbraak 10012540 under supervision of Hessel Oosterbeek. 1 1. Introduction Motivating students to work harder has been something researched many times before (Angrist 2009, Leuven 2010, 2011). Why? Because students tend to take longer than the time prescribed to complete their study. In this, the economics track at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) is no exception. A little under seven and a half thousand students joined the economics and business course of the UvA in the period between 1997 and 2010. At the end of 2011 only 35% got their bachelor degree and only 53% had passed all classes of their first year. This goes hand in hand with very high dropout rates; almost 50% of the students quitted the study without a bachelor degree, and of these dropouts over 60% drops out in the first year. So what did the UvA, or more specifically the FEB (Faculty of Economics and Business), do in order to increase the completion rate? They introduced a selection mechanism, called the BSA (Bindend Studie Advies or Obligatory Study Advice) in the first year of the economics and business course. In this paper I want to explore the effect this BSA has had on the student behaviour at the FEB1. The reasoning behind the implementation of the BSA was that first year students who collect more ECTS (European Credit Transfer System) in their first year, continue to do so in the following years (Booij, 2008). So in order to reduce the number of students who take too long to complete the study, the FEB introduced the BSA as a threshold. The BSA is an amount of ECTS a student must collect in order to be allowed to enrol for the second year. If they do not reach this threshold they are expelled from the study and are not allowed to start it again for three years. While the nominal amount of credits to be obtained in the first year is 60 ECTS, the BSA was set a lower amount. It was first introduced with the threshold set at 30 points in 2002, later this was raised to 35 in 2006 and to 45 in 2009. The hypothesis was that with the introduction and each increase of the BSA, the students who succeeded to reach the threshold would have a higher bachelor completion rate within four years. But does the BSA influence the study behaviour of the students? Since actual study behaviour is hard to measure, I use ECTS collected to assess the effectiveness of the BSA system. The effect of the BSA is measured on four different outcomes. First I look at the effect of the BSA on students in their first year; do they collect more ECTS? Second comes the effect on the completion rate of the bachelor within four years; does this increase? Third is the effect on dropout rates; do students drop out less after they have passed the BSA in their first year? Lastly I look at the negative effect the BSA might have on student behaviour, now that students have to pass a threshold they might be less able to focus on the courses specifically. Thereby neglecting their grades because in order to reach the BSA threshold they only focus on passing their courses, and not on how well they know the material. Passing a course with the minimum grade still awards the same amount of credits as passing it with a high grade; so do the grades drop after the implementation of the BSA? 1 This research will be most applicable for the FEB, because the motivation to choose a certain study is influenced by many factors: Actual interest for the field of the study, entry requirements, perceived easiness and job perspectives of the study to name a few. Since it is the motivation one has for the study that is the main focus of this paper, these results may not be applicable to other studies with a similar problem (students acquire too little ECTS). 2 The effect of the BSA seems to be ambiguous. While there is both a negative and a positive effect of the BSA on the first year ECTS collection, the effect of the BSA seems strictly positive on bachelor completion rate and reducing the dropout rates, but strictly negative on the grades obtained. These results suggest that the BSA in itself is just a guideline and a selection mechanism and it is not a tool that can be used to motivate students to work harder and to collect more ECTS. This paper is further organised as follows: The second part starts with a description of what motivation is, then continuous with relevant literature about incentivising students and ends with the general effectiveness of threshold performance, the third part presents a more detailed description of the results and is followed by the conclusion. 2. Literature review In this paper I explore the effect of the BSA system introduced by the FEB on their students. The way the BSA is supposed to change the students their behaviour is one of motivation. In this paragraph a description of motivation and it’s link to the BSA are first addressed, after which I continue with research done in the direction of rewarding students for good results and why this is not interesting for the FEB and lastly I go more in depth about why punishing them could do the trick. The problems the FEB wishes to address is that students take too long in order to complete their bachelor and very high dropout rates. The issue could be that there is a lack of motivation for these students to study in the regular term. While some students are able to find the motivation to complete all, or at least most of their courses, there is a large group that does not complete their courses. This suggests that while it is possible to complete all of the courses, some students do not find the motivation to do so, leaving the ability to do so aside. Motivation itself can be roughly distinguished into two categories, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (Ryan, 2000). Intrinsic motivation refers to motivation that comes from one’s own interests/desires; a student studies economics because he or she is inherently interested to know how things work within economics. With extrinsic motivation someone does a task not for the task itself but for the possibilities completion provides, for instance that a bachelor degree is needed to be able to apply for a specific desired job. The BSA system of the FEB is not only a criterion to select the truly motivated students but also a punishment for not passing courses. This can be translated into an extrinsic motivation system in which, in order to be able to avoid punishment, a student will have to work harder and thereby pass more courses. So not only does the BSA select the intrinsically motivated students, it could also motivate some of the less motivated students to start working harder. If this is the case this system will incentivise some students to perform better than they would have done otherwise. Strategies to influence behaviour extrinsically are either rewarding good behaviour or punishing bad behaviour. While the BSA system is implemented as a punishment, there is also research done in the direction of a system with rewards. This mostly focusses on paying students if they get good grades, thereby incentivising them to work hard. An example of this is given by Angrist, Lang and Oreopoulos (2009) in Canada. They executed an experiment 3 where students could get a monetary reward if they performed above a threshold GPA (grade point average). Second to this test group, the researchers also had a group which could apply for support services (extra aide by upper-class students or help with coping to study in general) and a third group which could apply for both support and a monetary reward. Compared to the control group, GPA’s did not rise for male students in any test group, but it did for females, with the greatest effect in the group with both aid and a monetary reward (Angrist, 2009). The effects however where small, thereby suggesting that students hardly react to rewards. Secondly, since relatively more males apply to the study economics at the UvA this research suggests that rewarding them would not trigger the preferred behaviour. Two researches conducted at the UvA itself find similar results to the one of Angrist et all.. In the academic year 2001-2002, Leuven, Oosterbeek and van der Klaauw ran an experiment in which students would receive a monetary reward if they completed all their first year courses. Their main result is that the effect of the monetary reward is small and insignificant (Leuven, 2010). While Angrist et all. then differentiate on gender to see if there is a difference, Leuven et all. look at the difference between low and high ability students. With this distinction they find that high ability student do react positively, while low ability students react negatively (Leuven, 2010). So on the high ability side these results could prove interesting, but in order to also motivate the low ability student this is not and effective system. Then, in the period of 2004-2006, Leuven et all try a different reward system, here students had to select themselves in a tournament in which the student with the highest grade would win a price (Leuven 2011). This time not for all their courses but a single course, which was mandatory in the first year.
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