Abstract

ROSA, Chaiane de Medeiros; SANTOS, Fabiano Fortunato Teixeira dos  and  MENDES, Heloisio Caetano. Academic performance in the freshman year of undergraduate studies: The case of the Universidade Federal de Goiás Statistics course. Educ. Puc. [online]. 2019, vol.24, n.3, pp.411-424. ISSN 2318-0870.  https://doi.org/10.24220/2318-0870v24n3a4514.

The objective of this study is to map the academic performance of freshman students of Statistics at theUniversidade Federal de Goiás (Brazil) in 2017. For that, the academic records of all the students who enteredthe course and who regularly attended the first two semesters, without dropping or stopping out of college,were analyzed. This choice was made so that one could compare the students’ academic performance inthe first and second semester. Historical data were analyzed using descriptive statistics to evaluate positionand dispersion measurements. Nonparametric tests were applied to analyze the equality between averagesand medians. In addition, a simple linear regression model allowed to make predictions on the average ofthe second semester, having the average in the first semester as the predictor variable. As a result, the studyevidenced a significant exclusion in the freshman year of the Statistics course, in addition to a significantpercentage of failure in both semesters, in the case of students who remained in the undergraduate course.

Keywords : Higher education; Evasion; Failure.

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