We fabricate polycrystalline silicon solar cells on glass by Si deposition on solid phase crystallized seed layers and derive an effective diffusion length L-eff,L-QE = 3 mu m from quantum efficiency measurements. Three-dimensional transport modeling reveals that L-eff,L-QE differs from the diffusion length L-eff,L-IV in the diode saturation current j(o)=(q n(i)(2)D)/(N-A L-eff,L-IV). Here q, n(i), D, and N-A denote the elementary charge, intrinsic carrier concentration, diffusion constant and doping concentration, respectively. However, the difference is small for our polycrystalline Si cells. Dominant recombination in the space charge region limits the open circuit voltage to 340 mV.