Study of the Determinants Contributing to the Academic Performance of University Students

This paper presents a case study of dependence of the academic progress of students and their input indicators. The research will be carried out at the programme “Economics”, faculty “St. Petersburg School of Economics and Management”, HSE Campus in St. Petersburg. The main goal of the current study is to determine the different determinants that contribute to the academic performance of students in the university. As input descriptive statistics we shall use information on the Unified State Examination scores, types of secondary schools the student went to, their academic achievements (award of a medal) and others. By eliminating all insignificant variables we choose a model that explains dependent variable (the average score for the cluster of mathematical and economic subjects) better than the rest of the models. So, there are three main predictors of the future academic performance of the applicants: the unified state examination in mathematics, Russian language and social studies. This can help understand how to select enrolees more effectively in order to reduce the dropout rate and raise student achievement.