**NEW WORKING PAPER COMING SOON!**
A growing body of research has examined the match between student ability and degree quality, revealing that mismatch is widespread, and that disadvantaged students are more likely to undermatch, enrolling in lower quality courses than expected, given their achievement. In this paper we study the role of schools in mismatch, comparing students with the same A-levels ('academically equivalent') from non-selective state schools to those in grammar (selective state) and private schools. We find even larger gaps in mismatch than has been documented for SES quintiles in state schools, with students from private schools attending university courses ranked up to 15 percentiles higher than their academically equivalent state school peers. Investigating the mechanisms behind this mismatch gap, we find that it is largely driven by application behaviour, rather than offers and acceptances.
Do teachers mark some pupils more generously than others? We propose a new approach to this longstanding question, by exploiting a unique situation where teachers were required to assign grades and the rankings of students within grades for a high-stakes assessment. We use this to test for imbalance of student characteristics across grade boundaries by comparing the top ranked students of one grade, to the lowest ranking students of the next grade. Due to the discrete nature of ranks, we implement an extension to the RDD framework called local randomisation. This does not require the standard assumptions used in teacher bias literature. We find evidence of teacher generosity on average favouring higher income, female, white students. However, there is large variation in gender bias across subjects. Teachers tend to favour a gender more the less that gender is represented in a subject.