Selection, Credential Quality, and Compensatory Returns: A Course-Level Event-Study of Academic Competition Awards and Student Achievement in Chinese Higher Education

Abstract Academic competition awards are a heavily institutionalised feature of Chinese undergraduate education, and they carry formal weight in admission and scholarship decisions, which makes them a high-stakes incentive shaping how students allocate academic effort. Using four years of course-level administrative records for 418 undergraduates at a Chinese public university, linked to the exact timing of their competition awards, we separate two processes with opposite distributional implications: selection, through which prior achievement raises the probability of winning and is then converted into further advantage, and compensation, through which competition involvement re-engages students whom conventional coursework serves poorly. Event-study estimates exploiting within-course variation show that selection dominates: winners already led their peers by 0.44 SD in first-year achievement before any award, and the post-award gain is roughly one-eighth as large. The returns that do exist are compensatory and concentrated in specialised coursework, and they are absent for students whose only credential is a participation prize that requires no competitive success. Because the design detects only effects of about 0.07 SD or larger, our inference rests on the selection gradient and the credential-quality contrast rather than on the magnitude of the average effect.