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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to determine whether the type of mathematics skills developed at secondary school an effect on students’ later success in business studies. At many business schools in Norway, more students are applying than there are places available. The ranking of applications depends on the grade point average (GPA) level, irrespective of the level or type of mathematics studied at secondary school, where the students are free to choose practically orientated or theoretical mathematics. Design/methodology/approach A quantitative analysis (regression model) was applied using data for undergraduate students enrolled in business studies over a three–year period (2012–2014). Findings Students with a non-theoretical background in mathematics obtain systematically lower grades on many courses, especially in core business school subjects. Ranking applicants to business studies courses based on their GPA scores irrespective of their level of mathematics may lead to the admission of less able students. Research limitations/implications There is little information available concerning why students choose different paths in mathematics at upper secondary school, but the decision students make has an influence on their grades in business courses. Originality/value By requiring more knowledge of theoretical mathematics, students’ performance at business school will improve. Changing the admission criteria could improve the quality of graduates and reduce the dropout rate.

The present study examines the self-efficacy levels and self-efficacy strength for male and female students in a course in Principle of Economics. The groups of male and female students may be mutually heterogeneous when it comes to personality types in a business school (Fallan & Opstad, 2014). This study does not treat the gender groups as internally homogeneous and examines how gender and gender-personality interactions separately affect self-efficacy. The participants are students enrolled at Trondheim Business School, Norwegian University of Science and Technology. These students have answered a questionnaires based on Meyer-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and questions about their perceived self-efficacy in Principles of Economics.The study reveals that female students have significantly lower self-efficacy level and self-efficacy strength than their male peers. However, this general conclusion does not hold for all gender-personality types. Lower self-efficacy level in economics for female students compared to those of their male peers does only exist for female intuition and feeling (NF) and intuition and thinking students (NT), not for the female sensing and perceiving student (SP). Furthermore, higher self-efficacy level for male students does only exist for male intuition and thinking students (NT) and not for male NF and SP students.Female students have significantly lower self-efficacy strength than their male peers as well. However, this does only exist for female intuition and thinking (NT) and sensing and perceiving (SP) students, but not for female NF students. The general result that male students have significantly higher self-efficacy strength than their female peers does only encompass male intuition and thinking (NT) students and not the male SP and NF students.The main contributions of this study are showing the need to go beyond gender to get a more complete picture of the differences in self-efficacy between female and male students. We should be cautions to conclude that self-efficacy is uniformly affected by gender. Gender-personality interactions do matter.

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Recent educational reforms aim at improving school or college quality by improving students' study incentives. However, surprisingly little is known about the effects of study on grade performance. This paper seeks to fill some of the gap by combining survey and administrative data from one Norwegian business school. A differences-in-differences approach exploiting within-student variation in effort within the same subject across two time periods is used to generate credible evidence. We find that grades are improved when students put in more effort. The estimated effects are of considerable size, although smaller than those reported by Stinebrickner and Stinebrickner (2008).