Abstract:

Predicting the performance of university students would be very useful to prevent dropout and/or low academic performance. This issue is particularly relevant for engineering degrees, as drop-out or failure rates are high compared to other degrees. One of the indicators of a student's academic potential is his or her scorecard at university entrance exam (EBAU, Spanish acronym). These exams are taken at the end of the high school period and are used to determine the cut-off score for the university degrees. Obviously, depending on the degree the scores on the different tests are weighted differently. This work aims to quantify the correlation of the EBAU grades with the academic performance. For this purpose, academic records from the Polytechnic School of Engineering of Ferrol (EPEF) at the University of A Coruña were analyzed. A total of 244 records of students from two engineering degrees (i.e. degree in Electrical Engineering and degree in Industrial and Automatic Electronic Engineering) were analyzed.

Keywords:

Academic performance, engineering, university students, entrance exams, grades.