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Low retention rates in higher education Information Technology (IT) studies have led to an unmet demand for IT specialists. Therefore, universities need to apply interventions to increase retention rates and provide the labor market with more IT graduates. However, students with different characteristics may need different types of interventions. The current study applies a person-oriented approach and identifies the profiles of first-year IT students in order to design group-specific support. Tinto's [13, 14] integration model was used as a framework to analyze questionnaire data from 509 first-year IT students in Estonia. The students’ response profiles were distinguished through latent profile analysis, and the students were divided into four profiles based on their responses to questions about academic integration, professional integration, and graduation-related self-efficacy. The difference in academic integration was smaller among the profiles than the difference in professional integration. Knowing these profiles helps universities to design interventions for each student group and apply the interventions to increase the number of IT graduates.

We studied how time measures can be used as predictors of test-taking performance in low-stakes tests. Our sample consisted of undergraduate students (N = 327) who took a computer-based cognitive abilities test. Our aim was to find how test-takers' motivation manifests itself in test-taking effort. We found that a high test-taking speed is related to low test scores (the correlation between test score and Response Time Effort was r = .71). Also, the mean time for wrong answers per item was smaller than the time for right answers (mean effect size d = .22). We found that performance in low-stakes tests is influenced by two test-taking effort characteristics: the number of items the test-taker attempts to solve and the mean time that is devoted to solve an item (β = .4-.5).We suggest that test-taking motivation should be studied further as it may provide useful information for interpreting results of tests and examinations.

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