Honors Projects

Abstract

Higher education has long tried to find the best measures to predict student success. Different colleges often have different guidelines, requiring different criteria to be evaluated. The BGSU Honors College has struggled with retention and recruitment of underrepresented students with their current admission criteria. This analysis studies different measures of student success such as BGSU GPA and number of completed Honors credits for high-achieving BGSU students who enrolled from Fall 2013 through Fall 2016 to find the best predictors of student success through regression analysis. Throughout this paper, the impact of ethnicity, gender, the college of a student’s program, high school activities, and ACT scores on BGSU GPA is discussed. This study reveals that high school GPA is still the best predictor of BGSU GPA, but other variables improve predictions. Somewhat surprisingly, this analysis finds that the college of student’s academic program is a significant factor for predicting BGSU GPA and how many semesters a student is enrolled to complete his or her degree. These findings suggest that the Honors College needs to understand how its curriculum helps or hurts students in different colleges to improve student success and retention, as well as its appeal to prospective Honors students. The best model produced used high school GPA, English ACT scores, athletic activities, ethnicity, and a student’s college to predict BGSU GPA. This model can be applied to Honors applicants to help estimate how they will perform at BGSU as an Honors student.

Department

Mathematics and Statistics

Major

Mathematics

First Advisor

James Albert

First Advisor Department

Mathematics and Statistics

Second Advisor

Meredith Gilbertson

Second Advisor Department

Sociology

Third Advisor

Kacee Snyder

Third Advisor Department

Honors Program

Publication Date

12-14-2017

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