The power of (no) recognition: Experimental evidence from the university classroom

We study the effect of unannounced recognition on performance with a field experiment involving first-year Dutch university students attending tutorials as part of a compulsory course. Our treatment, given in randomly selected tutorial groups, was to publicly recognize students who scored within the top 30% of their respective group on the first of the two midterm exams. The overall treatment effect on the second midterm grade is 0.03s (s= grade standard deviation) for the recipients of recognition, and 0.15s for the non-recipients, both statistically insignificant. The effect for the non-recipients increases with class attendance (itself unaffected by our treatment) and proximity to the cutoff grade for recognition, reaching a significant 0.55s for the 23% of the non-recipients who attended at least 12 out of 13 classes and were within the first quartile of the distance to cutoff. We argue that conformity to performance norm is among the forces shaping the effects we observe.