When students experience a rough freshman year of high school, they usually don’t recover from it, finds a new study by the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research.
Researchers tracked eight cohorts of Chicago high school freshmen, from the entering classes of 2006 to 2013—more than 187,000 students in all. They found that a student’s freshman grade point average closely predicted GPA in 11th grade. It also predicted whether students graduated high school, enrolled in college, and whether they would remain in college after one year, with A- and B-level students generally doing better than students with lower GPAs.
Freshman GPAs were twice as predictive of students’ outcomes as scores from standardized tests taken by Chicago students in 9th and 10th grades.
