Pre-College English Course Score and First Semester Achievement - Are They Truly Correlated?

Abstract

It is compulsory for all new undergraduate students at Unika De La Salle Manado to take pre-college English course provided by the institution. Having implemented this program since this institution started has triggered the curiosity to find out its effectiveness. The purpose of this study was to investigate if there is a significant relationship between English language proficiency (measured by PCEC Score) and the students’ academic achievement (measured by first semester GPA). This study involved undergraduate students at Unika De La Salle Manado majoring in Informatics. From 38 Informatics students, 20 students were selected as samples. After the data were processed using Pearson’s Correlation, the results showed that the correlation between students’ PCEC score and their GPA reached 0.635. It could be concluded that the PCEC score (representing English knowledge) is correlated positively with GPA (representing academic achievement). This may mean that English knowledge contributes to students’ academic achievement