Does High School Elective Mathematics Have Any Effect on Performance in University Economics in Ghana?

The Department of Economics has one of the highest rates of students’ failures, repetition and withdrawals in the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi. In the 2011/2012 and 2012/2013 academic years 35.8% and 30.6% of the 232 and 301 final year students respectively could not graduate. This concern has been attributed primarily to the low mathematical ability of the affected students. Consequently, university authorities in the 2013/2014 academic year made senior high school (SHS) elective mathematics a central requirement for students who intend pursuing economics as major. Really, this policy was not based on any systematic study conducted in the country. This paper contributes to existing literature by examining the impact of SHS elective mathematics on the performance of economics major students in KNUST. Two cohorts of students who entered KNUST in the 2009/2010 and 2010/2011 academic years were used for this study. Ordered probit was fitted to individual data collected from 334 respondents (142 females and 192 males) who graduated in June, 2013 and June 2014 respectively. The results show that SHS elective mathematics has significant positive influence on economics students’ academic performance in the KNUST. It was also found that performance in mathematics related courses in the first year and cumulative weighted average at the end of year one has significant and direct influence on the performance of students in subsequent years. The findings thus confirm that mathematical ability both at the SHS level and in the university is positively correlated with overall performance in university economics. INTRODUCTION Researchers have investigated the effect of mathematics on the performance of students in economics (Reid, 1993; Myatt and Waddell, 1990; Kassens Uhl and Fleming, 2007; Hoag and Benedict, 2010). The general conclusion appears to be that mathematics skills acquired in high school have strong link with good performance in economics. Certainly, economics courses are in general difficult for the average © 2015 Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) Journal of Science and Technology, Vol. 35, No. 3 (2015), pp98-105 98 http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/just.v35i3.9