Comparing Propensity Score Methodologies for Analyzing High School Class Assignment

Students’ class assignment is extremely relevant to their academic achievement, but the problem of assigning a student to the correct classroom is difficult to assess. For example, it may not be readily clear whether a student should be placed in remedial, regular, or advanced math classes, but it could greatly affect how well a student does in school. Maybe a remedial-level student is placed in a regular-level class and does poorly as a result; or maybe an advanced-level student is placed in a regular-level class and doesn’t do as well as they could. How can we determine the classes that students should be assigned to? This is the question we will try to answer; and we will see that, as a result, we will have to thoroughly evaluate several statistical techniques in order to properly answer this question.