Factors affecting the performance of undergraduates in Makerere University

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to assess the factors affecting students’ performance at Makerere University taking a case study of school of statistics and planning. The specific objectives were: To find out the effect of the number of course units done on the academic performance of undergraduates, to investigate the effect of regularity of attendance by the students to their academic performance, to establish the effect of students’ accommodation on their academic performance., to establish the effect of students’ financial status on their academic performance, to determine the effect of students’ social life on their academic performance and to find out the effect of attendance by lecturers to student’s academic performance. With the aid of Stata, data analysis was performed at two different levels namely univariate and bivariate. Univariate analysis with the aid of descriptive statistics and used frequency tables ,pie charts and bar graphs in the analysis of the data while bivariate analysis undertaken with the aid of Chi-square (2) to test the nature of association between the variables. Results showed that three null hypotheses were rejected and the following conclusions made; there is a relationship between number of course units done and student’s academic performance (p = 0.006), there is a relationship between regularity of attendance and student’s academic performance (p = 0.001) and there is a relationship between regularity of attendance by the lecturer and student’s academic performance (p = 0.000). The following recommendations are key, the university should fix a recess term so that students are able to do their retakes or redo papers they didn’t pass well and avoid having a big work load during the semester so as to enable them put more emphasis on the course units of that semester and improve understanding of the course content. A follow up should be done to ensure that students meet the university requirement of attending 70% of the lectures and finally lecturers should be closely supervised to ensure that lecturers fully teach or compensate the time lost to avoid over pumping the students towards examination periods and to give them more time to properly analyze and understand the course content.