How Fellow Students Improve Your Own Grades

Better grades thanks to your fellow students? A study conducted by the University of Zurich's Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics has revealed that not only the grade point average, gender and nationality peers can influence your own academic achievement, but so can their personalities. Intensive contact and interaction with persistent fellow students improve your own performance, and this effect even endures in subsequent semesters. Personality traits influence many significant outcomes in life, such as one's educational attainment, income, career achievements or health. Assistant Professor Ulf Zölitz of the University of Zurich's Department of Economics and Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development has investigated how one's own personality affects fellow students. The study he co-authored followed business students at a Dutch university. At the start of their university studies, all first-semester students were asked by the researchers to complete a survey on four personality traits: self-confidence, emotional stability, risk attitude and persistence. Afterwards, the students were randomly split into study groups in which they spent several months learning together.