samlet årgang - Økonomisk Institut - Københavns Universitet

Nationaløkonomisk Tidsskrift 143 (2005): 359-379
What affects students’ performance?
An investigation of the importance of
admission characteristics
Lisbeth la Cour
Department of Economics, CBS, E-mail: llc.eco@cbs.dk
Pascalis Raimondos-Møller
Department of Economics, CBS, E-mail: prm.eco@cbs.dk
SUMMARY: The present study relates student’s performance, as measured by the grades
the students achieve in individual course exams, and the admission characteristics.
We focus on the group of students who are enrolled in the Bachelor of Science in International
Business (B.Sc.IB) at Copenhagen Business School (CBS) – a program that
bases 20% of its student admission on kvote-1 (quota-1) students and 80% on kvote-2
(quota-2 students). This unique admission system for Denmark allows us to examine
what characteristics matters for the quota-2 group of students. Our results emphasize
the importance of high-school GPAs, while all other variables are either insignificant or
significant for the student performance in a couple of individual courses.
1. Introduction
Information about student academic performance is an increasingly important issue
for universities and other agents related to the educational sector, e.g. potential university
applicants, prospective employers of graduates, and public-policy makers in government.
While the demand for such information has been high in countries with private
or quasi-private education markets, see Blundell et al., (1997); and Smith et al.,
(2000), in Denmark such information, if collected, has rarely been processed and
analysed. There are reasons, however, to believe that this may change in the future. For
example the newly introduced admission fees for students from countries outside the
European Economic Area opens up a new market for universities in Denmark that necessitates
a careful design of admission selection criteria. Statistics on what admission
We acknowledge comments by two referees, Karsten Albæk and seminar participants at CBS and at the
2005 Danish Applied Statistics Meeting. We also thank Ulla Hansen, Tanja Christiansen, and Katrine Dam
for assistance with the data.