Germany has relied on its well-established tradition of preparing the workforce through the so-called dual system of practical in-firm training (apprenticeships) and theoretical foundations conveyed by vocational schools. Believing in the high quality of academic school programmes that prepare a small elite for university studies, the German…

This paper uses extensive student-level micro databases of three international student achievement tests to estimate heterogeneity in the effect of external exit examinations on student performance along three dimensions. First, quantile regressions show that the effect tends to increase with student ability--but it does not differ substantially…