Profiling students on courses with the highest multiple failure rates : empirical evidence from a blended learning environment

This paper reports the results of a study of student performance in the ten course units most often failed more than once by students at an Australian university between 2004 and 2008. Of those ten courses, seven were in accounting. Over 50,000 enrolments were captured. Crosstabs were examined for almost all possible combinations of fields under which data was recorded. Significant risk factors for multiple failures were found to be gender, mode of study, place of enrolment, first language group, and exposure to certain teachers rather than others. It was also noteworthy that first year undergraduate course units featured more strongly than other courses and that those units of accounting requiring the most agile arithmetic, such as consolidations, seemed to cause many casualties.