Academic Achievement of College Students and Their Locus of Control

The main aim of the study was to find out whether the locus of control of the individuals, of college going age, has any effect on their academic performances or not. The objective was to conduct a comparative study of the academic achievement and locus of control of college students. The researcher tried to gather a fair response from the total of 60 subjects between the age group of 18-21. The subjects were chosen randomly within the Pandit Deendayal Petroleum University. This study did not include effect of gender on the responses, as the locus of control is more of a cognitive drive which is independent from the gender specific ideology of the subjects. The research instruments used were Locus of control inventory (which reflects the way in which students feel about what happens in their academic institutions) and Life experience inventory (which reflects the experiences of life). The subjects were made to fill both the questionnaires and then the items were scored and results were analyzed. The scores were given to the subjects’ response based on the norms provided. Thereby each questionnaire response was scored and subjects were divided into two groups, namely, High on Internality (I) and Low on Internality (E). Further to this, the subjects were made to supply their overall academic performance grade, which was further analysed for each of the two groups. The two groups showed a clear indication that the group with high internality had a better Mean of their overall performance grade,7.40, whereas the latter showed a weak overall performance grade of 5.93. Also, the two groups showed a well correlation of the type of locus of control as per the locus of control inventory and life experience inventory (0.97), depicting a true locus of control that the subjects follow as per their experiences of life and the way they perceive about their academia in the college. The Mean and Standard deviation of the scores of the two groups were 30,19 and 5,6 respectively. Whereas the Life experience inventory showed a Mean of 17 and 10.

Recommendations: Increase the sample size as that proved to be a limitation to this study. Further more tests could prove a better result for a larger sample size.

A study across ages and socio-economic group is also possible and might give different results.