The effects of incentivized goals on academic performance

We run a pre-registered experiment with 628 university students to study the effects of incentivized goals on academic achievement. We offer half of the students 300€ conditional on attaining a goal GPA. We place the goal in the middle of the GPA distribution and explore the (potentially different) treatment effects for high and low ability students. We complement these data with lab-in-the-field data in which we measure students' WTP for this policy, GPA beliefs, and preferences. We find that incentives are only positive for those students who are on the threshold of attaining the goal. These effects are mainly driven by male students. Furthermore, we find that incentivized students, whether on the threshold or not, believe that they have been positively affected by the study: they find the courses more interesting, they believe that they were more focused, they claim to have had better self-control during the semester, and they have a higher WTP to have a goal for the next semester.