Factors influencing academic performance in Basic Business Statistics course at Polytechnic of Namibia

Abstract

The Polytechnic of Namibia offers the Basic Business Statistics course for all its undergraduate registered students for the Bachelor of Technology degrees in Business Administration, Public Administration ,Marketing, Human Resources Management and Economics programmes as part of their curriculum requirements, on full-time, part-time and distance education (open learning) basis. Academic performance in this course is generally poor, leaving a lot of students with the Basic Business Statistics Course outstanding even after their final year of study, thus delaying their graduation.This paper seeks to the determinants of the students' performance in this course by fitting a binary logistic regression based on the population of distance students who enrolled for the course in the first semester of 2012. The dependent variable is the performance or final result (Pass or Fail} for the Basic Business Statistics course. The independent variables include gender of student, Matric Score (Moths, English), home language, and degree programme.