We leverage the timing of pandemic-induced school closures to learn about the emergence of ordinal rank effects in education. Using administrative data from Italian middle schools for four cohorts of students, our study reveals that disrupting peer interactions during the first year of middle school – when students are still unfamiliar with one another – substantially diminishes the impact of ordinal rank on test scores. Instead, later interruptions to peer interactions do not significantly affect the strength of these interpersonal comparisons.
