Factors Affecting Business Students’ Performance in Arab Open University: The Case of Kuwait

The purpose of this study is to investigate factors affecting student performance in Arab Open University- Kuwaitbranch. To achieve this objective, all graduate students during the academic year 2009-2010 were examined. Thegraduates were 566 students, consisting of 353 female and 213 male students. The data were analyzed by usingOrdinary Least Square (OLS) multiple regressions. The outcome of the analysis revealed that the Grade PointAverage (GPA) of the student is affected by age, score of the high school and nationality. In addition, the resultsrevealed that younger students perform better than mature students and non-national students perform better thannational student. The results further revealed that significant gender differences exists, female students performbetter than male counterparts in line with a significant number of previous empirical studies. More importantly, theresults of the analysis indicated that marital status plays a significant role in determining the student's performanceby confirming that married students perform better than non-married counterparts.