Gender, risk aversion, and the “COVID” grading option in a principles of economics course

ABSTRACT

As the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the United States, colleges and universities faced the challenge of completing the academic term. Many institutions offered students the option of a ‘credit/no credit’ grading system, which wouldn’t affect their GPA. In this study, we examine which student characteristics are correlated with the decision to choose this grading option over a traditional letter grade. Our findings show that female students, particularly those with lower course grades, were more likely to opt for the ‘credit/no credit’ option than male students. This aligns with previous research indicating that female students tend to be more risk-averse, particularly in economics courses.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• confidence
• risk
• teaching economics

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• A2
• D81

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the feedback of our anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Subgroup estimation was used instead of interaction terms since a low ‘prefinal’ grade likely changes the effect of all of the regressors.

² By and large male and female students in this group are similar – though female students have slightly lower exam scores. Data available by request.

³ OLS results for final scores conditional on the same variables presented earlier are available from the authors. Final exam scores are estimated for the entire sample, and broken down by prefinal score and gender.