Student Perceptions and Learning Outcomes: Evidence from the Education Testing Service (ETS) Major Field Test in Business

Abstract

We examine course evaluation data from the core finance course and analyze how these data relate to performance on the finance portion of the Educational Testing Service Major Field Test in Business (ETS). We find that gender, SAT scores, GPA and concentration all have significant impacts on student performance. We also find that student perceptions of teaching and of how much knowledge they gained do not relate to the finance ETS score. Finally, we find that students who feel challenged in their finance core course do significantly better on the finance portion of the exam. This result is robust to different data partitions.