1) This document discusses why randomized control trials (RCTs) are important for impact evaluation. RCTs involve randomly assigning participants to either a treatment group that receives a program or intervention or a control group that does not. 2) Random assignment ensures that on average the treatment and control groups are identical except for receiving the program, allowing any differences in outcomes to be attributed to the program itself rather than other factors. This makes RCTs the most credible method for estimating a program's true impact. 3) The document presents examples estimating the impact of education programs in India using different methods like pre-post, simple differences, and differences-in-differences that can produce varying results. RCTs provide the