Academic success in higher education has received increasing attention from policy makers and institutional administrators. Although some factors affecting success are external to HEIs, others are internal and can be managed in order to improve students’ performance. This paper presents a study carried out in a Portuguese public university showing how collecting, analysing and reporting data on students’ admission and progress can contribute to awareness about success factors and to the improvement of related academic practices and decisions.

The study stresses that students’ transition to HE and their first-year experience are relevant for academic performance. Particularly, it shows that the criteria used in Portugal for admission to public HEIs, based on secondary school grades and national exams, induce some poor teaching and grading practices in secondary schools. These are misleading regarding students’ preparedness for HE and do not allow to discriminate effectively those who are well-prepared from those who aren’t.

Author Profile(s)
Professor José Antonio Sarsfield Cabral is a Member of the Board of the Portuguese Agency for Assessment and Accreditation of Higher Education (A3ES). He is Full Professor at the School of Engineering of the University of Porto and Director of the Industrial Engineering and Management Department, Pro-Rector for Quality Enhancement at the University of Porto from 2009 to 2014, member of the General Council of the Porto Business School and one of the founders of the Portuguese Association for Industrial Engineering and Management (APGEI) and Vice-President of the Portuguese Association for Quality from 1997 to 2000. He was awarded the prize “Quality Personality 2015” by the Portuguese Association for Quality. His research interests are mainly in the areas of quality management and applied statistics.