ARE THE GRADES OBTAINED IN HIGH SCHOOL GOOD PREDICTORS OF SUCCESS IN COLLEGE FRESHMAN?

In Spain, people aspiring to enter university must pass the test called Selectivity (S), whose value is obtained from an algorithm which considers the marks obtained in High School and a final exam that includes several subjects. The total must exceed 5 out of 10. There are two possibilities to enter university: having attended a High School (HS) or having completed training practical-professional studies (TP). Acceptance into a specific faculty depends on the difference between offer and demand of places to attend it (very different according to studies), and it is decided exclusively by means of S mark. Therefore, the higher demand, the higher cut-off. We have studied the influence of the marks obtained in S on the results of Freshman of Food Science Technology (FST; 10 matters) at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (Spain), over five academic years by using appropriate statistical methods. We observe that, in general, the marks obtained in S are good predictors for all students considered together (except for the subject Prod. Raw. Mat.), and the same is observed for HS students considered separately, but not for TP ones (except for the subjects of Statistics, Chemistry-I and Lab. Exp). Although the average scores of 7 of the 10 subjects are superior for those of HS taken globally, differences with respect to those coming from TP are not statistically significant except for Mathematics and Physics. The average notes are superior to 5 in all cases, and when ranked from the lower to the higher, deductive matters are the inferior group with respect to the descriptive ones, with the exceptions of Microbiology and Statistics. Chemistry and Microbiology stand out as subjects with the highest percentage of failures, but average percentages of whose decide not attend the exams are quite regular for all subjects.