Can this App Forecast their College GPA?
Written By Savvy Auntie Staff Writers
By Emily Shwake
Smartphones may help college grades instead of hurt them. If you have a niece or nephew in college, you might want to recommend the SmartGPA app.
The SmartGPA app, invented by Dartmouth researchers and tested on Dartmouth students, can predict GPA within 17 hundredths of a point accuracy based on a students study - and party habits. “Our SmartGPA results show there are a number of important study and social behaviors automatically inferred from smartphone sensing data that significantly correlate with term and cumulative GPA," says Dartmouth computer science Professor Andrew Campbell, senior author of the SmartGPA study. Using this data, programmers created the app that measures all of those behaviors to determine a student’s end-of-term marks.
Without any input from the user, the app automatically analyzes what is happening around the phone such as sleep duration, location, frequency of face-to-face conversation, and even stress levels.
The findings also resulted in a better understanding of the habits of higher academic performers. A few characteristics evaluated demonstrated that:
- Higher performers experienced an increase in stress levels up to the midterm period followed by a gradual decrease to the end of the term;
- In terms of sociability (i.e., the amount of face to face conversations), higher performers had shorter conversations during the early evening and night later in the term;
- As the term proceeded, higher performers spent more time studying;
- High performers were more conscientiousness about their behavior;
- High performers had higher levels of positive mood at the end of term.
These findings, however, are merely statistics and not a demonstration of a cause-and-effect relationship. Still, it seems like a pretty good use of a smartphone - other than texting and/or calling a favorite aunt, now and again.
Photo: Nosnibor137
Published: May 26, 2015