Abstract:

One of the factors that make students leave college before completing their studies is poor academic performance. Such students would lose the opportunities for better careers, while the institution would have a loss in enrollment and failure to achieve its mission. Hence it is important to identify and to provide timely guidance to underachieving students. The purpose of this study is to determine academic related factors that discriminate high achievers, as measured by a cumulative grade point average (CGPA) above 3.5, from low achievers with CGPA of less than 2.5. Participants were 323 students in an American Degree Transfer Program in a private college in Malaysia. We used a cross-sectional survey with a self-reported questionnaire, developed by us, to examine the relationship of students’ English competence, study strategies, effort, course curricula and goal clarification with their CGPA. Data reduction was done by exploratory factor analysis. Descriptive analysis, Spearman correlation analysis, ANOVA, and discriminant analysis were done to evaluate the study objective. The findings showed that high CGPA commensurate with the amount of effort that students put forth. The ability to adjust to the course curriculum and English proficiency were also significant discriminating factors, but not study strategies and goal clarification.

Keywords:

academic performance, discriminating factors, cumulative grade point average