If you’re a student in college or university wondering how your study an party habits affect your GPA; now there’s an app that provides real-time feedback on your studying, partying, exercising and how you’re doing academically.

SmartGPA app automatically reveals students’ mental health, academic performance and behavioural trends. The app uses automatic sensing data on the phone and in the cloud and machine learning algorithms around the clock to infer higher level behaviors, including partying (frequency and duration) and studying (duration and focus). It also tracks behavioral changes for the students, such as class attendance, sleep, physical activity and sociability (i.e., face to face conversation and indoor and outdoor mobility). The app works behind the scenes with no user input.

Researchers at Dartmouth College hope that the app and its findings will help students’ academic performance. Preliminary results from the SmartGPA app, which was installed on the smartphones of 30 Dartmouth undergraduate students shows that the app could predict their GPA within an impressive 17 hundredths of a point. Incredibly, the app does not use any prior knowledge of the students’ academic performance, such as test scores or IQ.

The app also found that higher performers experienced an increase in stress levels up to the midterm period, had shorter conversations during the early evening and night later in the term, spent more time studying, were more conscientiousness about their behavior, and had higher levels of positive mood at the end of term.

With this new data, researchers hope to propose novel methods to assess behavioural changes experienced by undergraduate students.

 

Source:

Dartmouth College. “Smartphone app predicts GPA.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 26 May 2015.