Correlation between students' workload and attendance as related towards final grades: A case of study on Statistics for first-year Engineering students

Are students' workload and attendance related to final grades? In this work, a monitoring experience of student workload and attendance is presented. During four academic years, first-year students of the Engineering School of Toledo (Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, UCLM, Spain) have been asked, three times a week, to estimate their autonomous workload devoted to the Statistics subject. The monitoring strategy has been anonymous, open and voluntary and has shown a high ratio of participation: 407 students out of 433. This information has been combined with attending to classroom-based lectures records and final grades. Along this work nonparamefric tests haven been used. The concept of "average student" is widely questioned in the literature and therefore instead of comparing mean values comparisons between the distributions are preferred. Results indicate that declared student's workload hardly reaches the 90 hours of autonomous work established in the ECTS ratio of the university. The strong significant differences between the distributions of percentage of attendance for different grading groups as well as the significant differences between the distribution of the percentage of workload monitorization show that attending and participating in the classroom-based lectures has a positive influence on grades.