The Relationship between Academic Performance, Students\u27 Admission Status, and Selected Student Characteristics

Executive Summary: This report presents the results of analyses of the relationships between a student\u27s admission status, his or her grade point average and a variety of student characteristics, including gender, ethnicity, and age. The records for a sample of 982 Western Washington University upper-division students were provided by the University\u27s Registrar for analysis. Upper-division undergraduates, defined as those having between 80 and 100 WWU credits, had an average GPA of 2.91. Students who began their higher education at Western (natives) were found to have a higher average GPA (2.96) than students who transfered from a two-year institution (2.85). These findings are inconsistent with those reported in the profile of 1990 Spring graduates in which transfer students achieved a higher average GPA than natives did. No differences were found between the GPAs of native and four-year transfer students or between two-year and four-year transfer students. As was also noted in the 1990 graduate profile, females in this sample (55%) had higher GPAs than males (45% of the sample) When comparing students of different age categories, students 40 years of age and older again had the highest GPA overall and students of different ethnic backgrounds achieved effectively equivalent GPAs. Some majors had higher average GPAs than others. Students from different admission status categories generally did equally well within a given major. The only exception was in the Business/Management major where natives outperformed two-year transfer students