I wonder if the relative age effect works in the other direction sometimes. I was born at the very end of August and was usually the youngest kid in my classes. Growing up, I thought of this as an advantage—it meant I was in more challenging classes. If I had been born just a few days later, maybe I would have been even more bored at school than I was.
Apparently at least one study found an opposite effect within the cohorts of students at a single university: https://d-nb.info/991457412/34
This study, though reminds me of the SSC post on Searching for One Sided Tradeoffs. If everyone admitted to a typical school is pre-selected for a certain overall level of ability, as visible in their applications, then the younger students in a class may have greater ability simply because their official, legible results underestimate them. Maybe?
I wonder, if we had year-round schooling instead of long summer breaks, and less once-a-year standardized testing, if schools would have started staggering class start dates? My school district had about a dozen classes within each grade, so what if instead of 12 new classes each September they had one a month, or 3 a season?
I wonder if the relative age effect works in the other direction sometimes. I was born at the very end of August and was usually the youngest kid in my classes. Growing up, I thought of this as an advantage—it meant I was in more challenging classes. If I had been born just a few days later, maybe I would have been even more bored at school than I was.
Apparently at least one study found an opposite effect within the cohorts of students at a single university: https://d-nb.info/991457412/34
This study, though reminds me of the SSC post on Searching for One Sided Tradeoffs. If everyone admitted to a typical school is pre-selected for a certain overall level of ability, as visible in their applications, then the younger students in a class may have greater ability simply because their official, legible results underestimate them. Maybe?
I wonder, if we had year-round schooling instead of long summer breaks, and less once-a-year standardized testing, if schools would have started staggering class start dates? My school district had about a dozen classes within each grade, so what if instead of 12 new classes each September they had one a month, or 3 a season?
I know that some schools in the US have historically had start dates in both January and September.