Browsing by Author "Zölitz, Ulf"

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Open Access
Are professors worth it? The value-added and costs of tutorial instructors
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2018) Feld, Jan; Salamanca, Nicolás; Zölitz, Ulf
A substantial share of university instruction happens in tutorial sessions— small group instruction given parallel to lectures. In this paper, we study whether instructors with a higher academic rank teach tutorials more effectively in a setting where students are randomly assigned to tutorial groups. We find this to be largely not the case. Academic rank is unrelated to students’ current and future performance and only weakly positively related to students’ course evaluations. Building on these results, we discuss different staffing scenarios that show that universities can substantially reduce costs by increasingly relying on lower-ranked instructors for tutorial teaching.
Open Access
Understanding Peer Effects: On the Nature, Estimation and Channels of Peer Effects
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2015) Feld, Jan; Zölitz, Ulf
This paper estimates peer effects in a university context where students are randomly assigned to sections. While students benefit from better peers on average, low-achieving students are harmed by high-achieving peers. Analyzing students’ course evaluations suggests that peer effects are driven by improved group interaction rather than adjustments in teachers’ behavior or students’effort. We further show, building on Angrist (2014), that classical measurement error in a setting where group assignment is systematic can lead to substantial overestimation of peer effects. With random assignment, as is the case in our setting, estimates are only attenuated.