Relative performance feedback in education: evidence from a randomised controlled trial

In a one-year randomised controlled trial involving thousands of university students, we provide real-time private feedback on relative performance in a semester-long online assignment. Within this set-up, our experimental design cleanly identifies the behavioural response to rank incentives (i.e., incentives stemming from an inherent preference for high rank). We find that rank incentives boost performance in the related course assignment, but also the average course exams grade by 0.21 SDs. These beneficial effects remain sizeable across all quantiles and extend beyond the intervention period. Furthermore, rank feedback stimulates social learning, i.e., rank incentives make students engage more in peer interactions.