Students who over-enrol or tackle subjects without passing the prerequisites are more likely to fail, according to a University of Canberra study.
But once failed, the chances of repeating students are the same as other students.
The study looked at Finance 1, one of the university’s subjects with a reputation for being difficult to pass.
Dr Ian Maclean and Dr Judy Patterson studied Finance 1 students in the second semesters of 1991 and 1992.
In 1991, the overall pass rate of the 244 students was 69 per cent.
Thirty-four students who had failed the pre-requisite, Management Accounting 1, were allowed to do Finance 1 while repeating Management Accounting.
Of the 34, 23 failed a pass rate of 32 per cent.
Of the 210 students who had the pre-requisites, 158 passed and 52 failed a pass rate of 75 per cent.
“The message from these numbers was abundantly clear the prerequisites for Finance 1 should be enforced,” the researchers said in the latest edition of the university paper Monitor.
Students who did Finance 1 in a semester when they had more than the recommended 12-point load also did badly.
The pass rate of over-enrolled students was 43 per cent; the pass rate of those taking a normal load was 70 per cent.
Over-enrolling was seen by students as a way of catching up units failed or abandoned earlier in the course.
The message from the study is that over-enrolling only leads to students getting further behind.
Eighty per cent of over-enrollers were full-fee-paying [overseas] students.
These paid a flat fee per year, irrespective of how many units they did.
Only 20 per cent of over-enrollers were Australian residents, who under the Higher Education Contribution Scheme paid by the unit.
Having failed, however, the chances of failing a second time (32 per cent) were not statistically different from first-time students (34 per cent).
The researchers said repeat students had the advantage of traversing the material before, but the disadvantage of having demonstrated an incapacity to cope with it.
The magnitude of these effects had not been measured, but the results showed they were approximately equal.
Dr Maclean said yesterday that the results defied the anecdotal evidence.
“The study was very useful because it picked up preventable causes of failure,” he said.
“Of course, there are many other factors surrounding failure which would take complicated studies to isolate. Our study used the readily available data.”
The researchers said in the article, “We suspect our conclusions may be applicable to other units.
“Checking student records to ensure that prerequisites have been satisfied and that there is no over-enrolment is tedious, time-consuming and expensive.
“It is in students’ own best interests to ensure their enrolments are in order.”