Abstract:

In several countries, public high education institutions use an entrance examination for choosing from all their candidates. The ones with higher marks are admitted at university and begin their professional education. It is supposed that students which obtain better results in this exam will have a better performance across their studies, but using the entrance examination as the only criteria could not assure, this and other factors could be considering as entrance criteria besides a single exam.

In Mexican Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM), students which aspire entering an engineering, must perform an admission exam, and the best marks are accepted, also, they must fulfill the following conditions: exam mark must be greater than 600 points (from a maximum of 1000) and their medium high level (the former level before high education) average must be at least 7.0. University expects that these students will have a good performance during their studies, however there are other enrollment factors that could be more related with the performance of students. Talking about performance, at UAM, students have many problems during first year, formed by three scholar periods called quarters, in this period of time, several students dropped out their studies due to a slower progress in their studies or a low performance approving subjects.

It's important to analyze if exists a relationship between students performance and the mark obtained in an admission exam. Possibly using this exam as the only criteria for enrollment could not be a suitable way for selecting the best candidates. The goal of this work is to analyze the impact of admission exam marks and other student´s characteristics over their performance across their first year, using as measure the Grade Point Average (GPA) and the amount of credits approved during their first year. The characteristics used for the analysis include: school of origin, entrance age, medium high school average and mark in admission exam.

Processed data was gathered from the General File of Students which is a file that contains several information of the students at UAM. The academic information, needed for obtaining GPA and total of credits, was processed from the academic record. This contains the record of every student for every studied subject, including a key identifying the subject, the scholar period (quarter) and the obtained mark, in case of UAM, it's expressed with letters. The amount of students considered for the analysis was initially 538 which gathers information from students which enter university from year 2010 to 2016, for this study were only considered students of Computing Engineering.

For the analysis, were applied some statistical techniques like Pearson coefficient correlation and linear regression which shown the relationship between some independent variables with a dependent one. In this case, the independent variable were: school of origin, entrance age, medium high school average and mark in admission exam and dependent variable were considered GPA and the amount of credits approved during the first year. Results from this work will allow analyzing if there exists a high relationship between the mark obtained in an admission exam and the performance during their first year for each aspect, GPA and amount of credits, or if there are other criteria more related with academic performance and should be considered beside or even instead of a single admission exam.

Keywords:

Admission exam, education analytics, enrollment criteria, student performance factors, university admission.