To repeat or not to repeat a course

Abstract

The difficult transition from high school to university means that many students need to repeat (retake) one or more of their university courses. This paper examines the performance of students who were repeating first-year core courses in an undergraduate business program. It used data from university records for 116 students who took a total of 232 repeated courses across 6 subjects. The results show that the student’s original course grade and cumulative grade point average were positively associated with the new grade obtained in the repeated course. Conversely, the original course grade was negatively associated with the extent of improvement obtained by repeating.