The effects of birth month on academic performance

Abstract

In this master thesis we are examining how birth months affect the exam grades for chosen students at the University of Stavanger (UiS). There is a lot of previous literature on birth month effects, and the phenomenon on being relatively oldest in a cohort and performing better is well established in the literature.

Our results, using academic performance as the dependent variable, indicate that there are no birth month effects among female students at UiS. Actually the January born female students within our sample perform worse compared to female students from other birth months. For the male students there is some pattern of higher academic performance with an early birth month, especially for the petroleum technology students.

We believe that extensive selection processes and the Norwegian education system can explain our findings. In order to apply for higher education, the applicant has to fulfill certain requirements making the students enrolling into higher education a selected group. It is likely that all of these are good performing students, which might explain why any potential birth month effects have been reduced. Whereas the Norwegian education system has strict rules regarding enrollment and deferment, combined with no ability or performance based group placement of children seem to provide a good learning environment for students with varying ability. The presence of birth month effects among male students is likely to arise from natural differences in developmental paths by gender. The late-born boys seems to still suffer from some of the disadvantages of being relative younger.