The use of competences assessment to predict the performance of first year students

Students´ performance in the development of their academic career depends on their input level for a core of key competences that they have already developed in the secondary education level. In 2008-09 we led a project called “Comparative study about the level of the development of generic competences in newcomer students of Computer Engineering” with the participation of other schools from Spain and funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education. In this paper we have extended and revised a previous work in which we developed a predictive model to avoid early desertion of studies. Our model uses the student performance in the competences tests to predict the future performance along their courses. With this improved version of the model we have observed with new data from a fresh sample that our model and studies like ours can provide a vivid figure of how students will perform in the future. It can help education policy makers and professors to improve their teaching techniques and to provide the proper tools to those students that need them the most.