Factors Influencing University Students’ Performance: A Comparison of Faculties’ Assumptions with Students’ Perceptions

Abstract

In the previous research, it was proved that there were so many factors like students’ personal characteristics, family background, learning habits, previous academic background, college environment etc. which influence directly or indirectly the performance of college students in their university examination. The number of such factors has been identified by studying the previous work carried out by different researchers in different geographical areas and boundaries of the world. In many researches, when the opinions of the students and teaching faculties has been taken for similar factors to know the importance of these factors, the significant differences was found in their opinion for some factors. This paper investigates and compares the faculties’ assumptions with the students’ perceptions for various influencing factors. The comparison is done on the basis of their ranking of mean values of the factors allocated by students and faculties independently as per the importance of factors and one way ANOVA is used to check the significance of differences in their opinion. The result shows that there are similarities in the opinions of both, faculties and students, for most of the factors. But for some factors the significant differences in their opinion is also observed. The result of this research can be used for enhancing the performance of students by improving the influencing factors rank-wise. Top ranked factors may be given higher priority. Also this study will provide a platform for continuing the debate on the importance of various influencing factors for engineering students.