The effect of lecture/seminar attendance on exam results

The core of this study is to investigate how attendance at the lectures and seminars affects the exam results. Despite the fact that schools are the primary source of education, attendance at the universities is not usually compulsory. As a university student, I was interested if and how attendance influences academic performance at the university where I study. Thus I decided to conduct a survey and chose an undergraduate course Econometrics II at the Charles University in Prague. The sample is 42 students. Because of the problem of omitted variable bias, it was necessary to control for the unobservable factors such as ability, motivation, and effort. Therefore there are used two methods of estimation. Firstly, the method of ordinary least squares with proxy variables and secondly the method of two-stage least squares with an instrumental variable. The results indicate that in the studied sample there is a positive and significant effect of attendance at the lectures on the exam results, however, the effect of attendance at the seminars is not statistically different from zero.