Differential effect of university entrance score on first-year students’ academic performance in Portugal

Abstract

The main goal of this study is to show that the association between university entrance score and first-year students' academic performance varies randomly across courses after controlling for students' sociodemographic, schooling trajectory and motivational variables. The sample consists of 2697 first-year students who were enrolled in 54 courses at a Portuguese public university in 2015/16. Multilevel modelling of academic performance suggests that 34% of variability in grade point average is due to differences among courses and that 80% of such variability is explained by the field of study, whether the university is the student's first choice, and the student's gender, age and parents' level of education. In addition, the results corroborate that the university entrance score is the strongest predictor of first-year academic performance.

Student’s access and performance in the Portuguese Higher Education: Issues of gender, age, socio-cultural background, expectations, and program choice

“…Such a result, to be confirmed throughout the programme, may be the manifest of an institutional equity policy that is worth noting, since it runs counter to previous results, according to which the phenomenon of abandonment and failure in HE especially penalized students from disadvantaged social strata (Almeida et al, 2006;Engrácia & Baptista, 2018). In agreement with the results presented by Ferrão and Almeida (2018a), using the same cohort of students, the authors applied multilevel regression models to student's GPA, including as explanatory variables the familiar socio-cultural group, age, if the university is the first choice, and the scientific-disciplinary area. The findings suggest that the group of students with low socio-cultural origin have, on average, the classification at the end of the first year increased by 0.14 standard deviation compared to their colleagues from other socio-cultural origin.…”

“…In fact, the results presented in this paper and in Ferrão and Almeida (2018a), for the first time in Portugal, show the advantage in the GPA that students of disadvantaged sociocultural origin have compared to their colleagues, even after controlling for the remaining variables.…”

Predicting Academic Success: A Longitudinal Study of University Design Students

“…Secondary school performance measured as either overall school grade point average or as university entrance scores is highly predictive of university performance and this relationship is well established in the literature (Anderton et al 2017; Mills et al 2009). The correlation between high school academic performance and university grade point average in first year can account for up to 25 per cent of the variance (Ferrao & Almeida 2019). Certainly, in many research studies, it appears that high school grade point average is the best predictor of academic success at university (Brecht & Burnett 2019; Dorta‐Guerra et al 2019; Goegan & Daniels 2019; Parsons 2016).…”

High school training outcome and academic performance of first-year tertiary institution learners - Taking 'Input-Environment-Outcomes model' into account

“…(2018) and Terzi and Kirilmazkaya (2020) revealed that gender has little impact on predicting academic performance. Nonetheless, other studies have linked academic performance and GPA to students’ gender ( Ferrão and Almeida, 2019 ; Lemmens et al., 2011 ). To differentiate between male and female academic performance, Adekitan and Shobayo (2020) and Thiele et al.…”