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<p>Student evaluation response rates have declined sharply in recent years, raising concerns about the representativeness of data used for high-stakes personnel decisions. We provide evidence that a simple, system-level incentive substantially increases participation. That incentive is early grade access upon evaluation completion. When one large public university inadvertently removed this incentive in Fall 2016, response rates fell 29 percentage points, from 66 percent to 37 percent, over three years. Using panel data covering 438,504 student-course observations from 13,683 students observed both before and after the policy change, we estimate a within-student decline of nine percentage points. Comparison institutions with no policy change show stable response rates over the same period. We find only small differences in the policy’s impact across student demographic groups, suggesting the incentive removal affected participation relatively uniformly. Our findings demonstrate that grade-access incentives represent a low-cost, scalable intervention for increasing evaluation participation.</p>

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The Effect of Grade Access Incentives on Student Evaluation Response Rates

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年5月22日

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  • Bree J. Lang,
  • Matthew Lang

摘要

Student evaluation response rates have declined sharply in recent years, raising concerns about the representativeness of data used for high-stakes personnel decisions. We provide evidence that a simple, system-level incentive substantially increases participation. That incentive is early grade access upon evaluation completion. When one large public university inadvertently removed this incentive in Fall 2016, response rates fell 29 percentage points, from 66 percent to 37 percent, over three years. Using panel data covering 438,504 student-course observations from 13,683 students observed both before and after the policy change, we estimate a within-student decline of nine percentage points. Comparison institutions with no policy change show stable response rates over the same period. We find only small differences in the policy’s impact across student demographic groups, suggesting the incentive removal affected participation relatively uniformly. Our findings demonstrate that grade-access incentives represent a low-cost, scalable intervention for increasing evaluation participation.