UPA Home > DID YOU KNOW...
May 2007
Did you know.... that taking a full time class load every semester decreases the average semesters to graduation and increases cumulative GPA at graduation for all undergraduate students who graduate in six years or less?A full time undergraduate is defined as a student who takes twelve credit hours or more in a semester; if a student takes less than twelve hours in their semester of graduation, they also get credit for being a full time student. The population of this study is limited to undergraduates who graduated in six years or less. This study tracks the percentage of semesters that a student takes over twelve hours and excludes summer sessions. If students take 100% of their semesters full-time, then every semester they attended NC State was as a full-time student. And if a student attends for ten semesters and eight of them are as a full time student, then 80% of their semesters were full time.
Table I shows how many NC State students graduated according to what percentage of semesters they were full time students. Of the 11,287 undergraduates who entered NC State during the fall semesters in 1998, 1999, and 2000, only 15 graduated when the majority of their semesters were as a part time student. These students tended to enter NC State with above average academic credentials and had more pre-college credits than other students. Of all the graduates, the overwhelming majority – 5,774 – were full time students every semester.
Table I
Intuitively, the students who attended full time every semester graduated faster than most other students. These students gathered credit hours faster so they should graduate faster. The surprise from Table II is that the fifteen students who were full time only 26% to 49% of their semesters at NC State, also had, on average, the fewest semesters to graduation. A very surprising result that may only be explained by all the college credits those students entered NC State with; if they already have lots of credits they can take fewer classes per semester and still graduate quickly. These fifteen students are certainly an exception, not a rule. The many students who take full time class loads between 50% and 99% of the time have the highest average time to graduation, almost a full year more than the students who always attended as full time students.
Table II
What we find in Table III is that the students who always take over twelve ours per semester also have the highest cumulative GPA at graduation at 3.15. There is also a consistent relationship between percentage of semesters taken full time and cumulative GPA at graduation: the more hours you take per semester, the higher your GPA at graduation.
Table III
One important note is the difference between correlation and causality. The relationship between full time class loads and GPA is obvious but the cause of the higher GPA is not necessarily that students take more hours. A student looking to boost their cumulative GPA won’t automatically do it by taking more hours. However, taking a full time class schedule will definitely move a student to graduation faster and is recommended.