An investigation into the influence of pre-admission student attributes on academic performance among management students: case of cooperative management programme,Cooperative College of Kenya,Nairobi.

Abstract

This study is on pre-admission predictors of academic performance among cooperative management students. The study sought to investigate whether or not pre-admission attributes of cooper-ative management students can help to predict their academic performance in College. The main objective was to identify significant predictors of academic performance out of the student attributes selected. their relationship with academic per-formanc e and the predictive ability of derived modelCs).The predictor variables selected for the study :Mat-ital status.academic achievements.general Knowledge.sex.number of years out of school.personality and interest in the programme_ The major primary source of my data were student records at the ministry of Cooperative. Data on 87 students was gathered and analysed using correlation and regression analysis. Another group of 85 students was used to validate the three models derived using Theil's inequality coefficient. The validaiion results confirmed the good p;edictive ability of the models. The criterion variables used to derive the three models wer'e:Over-all academic performance.academic pet-f or manc e in accounting related courses and academic performance in nonaccounting related courses.From the results of the analysis and model validatio~ .it was fou~d that academic predictors for accounting related courses are fairly different from those for non accounting "t-elated cours es .On Iy personality appeared significantly related with the two response variables. ( vi) Out of the seventeen predictive factors used in this study ,only years out of school, English language,personality,mathematics,science,and '0' level aggregate were found significantly related with at least one of the criterion variables used.In situations where a particular variable was found significantly related with more than one criterion variable its relative importance varied.In the order of importance English Language ,personality, mathematics,and 'Level aggregate were significantly related with performance in accounting. While years out of school ,mathematics ,personality,, and English language showed significant correlation with overall academic performance.On the other hand years out of school,science and personality were found important in predicting performance in non-accounting courses